Baby Landon Johnson died a preventable death from insufficient breastmilk, but he is making a big difference nonetheless.

Landon’s story has lit a fire under the breastfeeding industry. Oh, not to make sure that other babies don’t die, too. Be serious! The lactation industry has mobilized all its resources to prevent cognitive dissonance and loss of income.

Ignoring a baby’s preventable death from insufficient breastmilk by claiming it is is rare is as immoral ignoring a child’s preventable death from asthma by claiming it is rare.

Getting beyond the headlines to the truth about recent stories of “breastfeeding-related deaths.”

Why is Landon’s death in quotes? Because Seals Allers, like other professional lactivists, are trying to bury him twice, (first from breastfeeding risks and second by being erased from consciousness by lactivists).

Pro-tip: When a patient dies a preventable death it is heartless and unethical to pretend that death never happened.

Seals Allers writes:

Most importantly, we must not allow the media or any organization’s desire to sensationalize a rare occurrence turn into a dangerous, broad-based message that exclusive breastfeeding kills. That is categorically untrue and extremely irresponsible. In fact, decades of global research proves that exclusive breastfeeding consistently saves lives.

Let’s parse that paragraph:

1. Reporting a preventable death is not “sensationalizing” it and it is immoral to imply otherwise.

Health professionals should promote outcomes, i.e. healthy babies, a process, i.e. breastfeeding. Landon died because lactivists lied — to each other and to mothers. Lactivists have idealized breastfeeding to the point that it bears no relationship to reality.

Breastfeeding isn’t perfect because it’s natural; it’s imperfect precisely because it’s natural. Ignoring babies screaming from hunger by claiming insufficient breastmilk is rare because women were “designed” to breastfeed is no different from ignoring a child who is wheezing by claiming asthma is rare because children are “designed” to breathe. It reflects ignorance of physiology at best and heartlessness at worst.

2. Breastfeeding does kill.

The benefits of breastfeeding in industrialized countries are trivial, a few less colds and episodes of diarrheal illness across the entire population of infants in the first year. Indeed, around the world, the countries with the highest rates of infant mortality have breastfeeding rates approaching 100%.

The incidence of insufficient breastmilk (particularly in babies’ first most vulnerable days) is 15% or more. If breastfeeding disappeared tomorrow, no team baby’s life would change appreciably. If formula disappeared tomorrow, tens of thousands of American babies would die each and every year, let alone babies from other countries.

3. Decades of research does NOT prove breastfeeding saves lives.

It would be more accurate to say that decades of extrapolation from small studies predicts that breastfeeding might save lives in theory, BUT there’s no population based data that shows that breastfeeding saves the lives of term babies in reality.

I can point to studies that report hundreds of infant injuries and deaths from insufficient breastmilk and smothering in or falling from mothers’ beds in so-called “Baby Friendly” hospitals while Seals Allers can’t identify term babies who died as a result of properly prepared infant formula. Neither can Melissa Bartick, MD, the author of many of the studies that predict that breastfeeding saves hundreds or thousands of lives.

One paragraph, three bald-faced lies. No doubt Seals Allers believes what she is writing, but that doesn’t make it any less spurious or any less deadly.

Seals Allers also subscribes to the immature “reasoning” of lactivists that if you don’t praise breastfeeding, you must be trying to undermine it and whines that her feelings and those of her colleagues are being hurt by those who want to prevent the deaths of babies from breastfeeding

But I’m deeply concerned by the aggressive and mean-spirited comments posted by the founders on blogs and social media. People are being viciously attacked or blocked simply for expressing counter opinions and sharing important facts. There’s high school-ish name calling that’s downright nasty (please stand by and watch this comments section) and other tactics clearly designed to silence and control women. Is this the best way forward? Adopting tactics of aggression and using cyber bullying is not the modus operandi of a well-intentioned education campaign that merely seeks to caution mothers. With so much at stake, we owe it to our babies and ourselves to question the true intent here.

Oh, the irony. I can’t imagine a more vicious form of cyber bullying than denying both the deaths of babies and the lives experiences of hundreds of thousands of women as Seals Allers does in the very piece she has written.

Kimberly Seals Allers, if breastfeeding saves hundreds of thousands of lives each year, show us the changes in infant mortality as breastfeeding rates rise and fall that support that claim.

Show us a the scientific evidence that hundreds of term babies die in the US as a result properly prepared formula. Can’t do that, right?

Show us the scientific evidence that tens of term babies babies die in the US as a result of properly prepared formula. Can’t do that either, right?

If you can’t, stop trying to bury babies like Landon twice. It’s a tragedy that he was buried in a tiny coffin because lactation professionals reassured his mother he was doing fine at the same time that he was actually dying. Don’t compound that tragedy by trying to erase his death and ignore the lesson that we ought to learn from it:

Breastfeeding, like vision and like breathing, have very substantial failure rates. Pretending otherwise may ease your cognitive dissonance, but it condemns hundreds of babies to painful, preventable deaths.

Does anyone have any thoughts about the belief that “if you pump/express, and nothing comes out, that doesn’t mean anything. Plenty of mums produce lots of milk for their babies but can’t express a drop”?
This has been told to me loads of times during training for BF support, but I’ve always been skeptical. I did a lot of PubMed searching to try to find research studies on test-expression (benchmarking against test-weighing or other methods to establish milk intake), but couldn’t find much. (it’s a very hard search process to do as the terms are a bit non specific).
Then I cross checked my extremely trusty copy of “Lactation Physiology Nutrition and Breastfeeding” by Neville and Neifert (just sooo old-school 70s/80s you can’t imagine, great on the physiology and biochem stuff) and on p200-201 they discuss 3 studies looking at test expression results. I can’t get the original papers so I can’t see if individual women might have very low expression outputs (in relation to amount baby is taking), but they discuss group averages and say that in all 3, test expression amounts (24hr-output) are very close to, or higher than, averaged across the groups, the amounts taken by the baby in a 24hour period on a subsequent day.
This seems to suggest to me that it would be unlikely that mothers are indeed EBFing a healthy gaining baby but literally, unable to produce anything (or vv little) through expression – therefore, I feel if a mum is already worried about supply and how her baby is doing on EBF *and* she confirms there is little via expression – this would back up concerns that already exist. Rather than lead one to dismiss the possibility of low milk intake being something we need to worry about (just put the baby to the breast more, bla bla).
Thoughts? anyone seen any proper references on this from recent studies? (the neville/neifert are all a bit old).

yentavegan

In my hands on experience ( all anecdotal- all personal “case studies” of women I have counseled) The inability to express enough milk for a feeding, even though the baby was growing and thriving was due to the mother being ambivalent about leaving her infant . This is where the mother self reported her inability to express milk. I would wager that if she were hooked up to a hospital grade double pump her milk would express regardless of her feelings. Or the mother was using a broken electric pump. I have never come across ( 30 years of helping parents ) a mother with an abundant ample milk supply who when committed to expressing her milk, could not.

yentavegan

Therefore the extrapolation to a parent with a low/no weight gaining infant and mother being unable to express 2 ounces in 20 minutes of expressing is an indicator of low.insufficient milk supply.

evidencebasedbreastfeeding

Absolutely – the research studies actually record the data, rather than the mothers’ report of her milk production, which is 2 very different things. Thank you for clarifying. I was always taught that it is very very “old school” and now discredited idea that a mother (where we are worried about milk production) could be asked to pump, we look at how much is obtained, and then learn from this some data relevant to her milk production capacity.
I was taught this is nonsense, it is perfectly possible that a mum is making plentiful milk but “just can’t pump”.
I was, and remain, v skeptical on that.
Thanks.

The Bofa on the Sofa

The problem is, while it is “possible” that a woman can make enough and not be able to pump, women who can’t pump are more likely to have a problem.

Lactivists always latch on to (pun intended) the “it’s possible it’s not a problem,” whereas actual medical people would want to verify it

evidencebasedbreastfeeding

Indeed. The crashing refusal to actually “look at data” (whether from an individual in a specific situation, or the published research studies relevant to that situation) really annoys me about the current BF support thing.
The never-endingly amazing Trish Greenhalgh’s fabulous definition of EBM in her book “How to Read a Paper” (my bible for 20 years) is:

“the use of mathematical estimates of the risk of benefit and harm, derived from high-quality research on population samples, to inform clinical decision-making in the diagnosis, investigation or management of individual patients”.

(replace patient with just individual here, and maybe remove “clinical”).

Imagine a person with a positive urine dipstick for glucose and saying “well, some people without diabetes do have positive dipsticks”. But refusing to say what proportion, any of the diagnostic statistics for this, or then to refer the person for an OGTT?

kilda

that’s so true. It’s similar to the way they dismiss concerns about CPD by pointing out that US isn’t that accurate so the baby could be smaller than it is measuring. Somehow the possibility that the baby could also be larger than it is measuring doesn’t occur to them.

“it’s possible it’s not a problem” implies the corollary “it’s possible it IS a problem,” but somehow they overlook that.

Dr Kitty

This sort of thing applies to women who don’t find that pumps stimulate their let down effectively, which is more likely with manual expression or hand pumps and highly unlikely with modern electric breast pumps.

I was someone with abundant supply, but who almost never experienced let down without feeding or pumping (and so never leaked or needed breast pads) and got very little hand expressing.

I could still express 4oz of colostrum in about 10 minutes Day3 with a hospital pump with my daughter, before my milk had come in, and was happily expressing 8-10oz in 10 minutes with a double pump when my son was an infant.

When my supply tanked with my son after a bout of D&V it was quite obvious he was still hungry and I was pumping almost nothing.

I don’t really buy the “so what if you only pumped 1/4oz- I’m sure your baby gets 10 times that much!” line.

mamajb

I’d like to explain how well supply and demand works with this summary~

“Whatever the baby takes during one feeding will be replaced in time for the next feeding. In the beginning, the baby will want to nurse frequently, probably every two hours. The breasts build up the milk supply from zero to 1-2 ounces. After several days, once the milk supply has been established, the baby will receive more milk at each nursing session and be able to last longer between feedings.
When a bottle of formula is substituted for a nursing session. Your body does not know that the baby received a bottle. It senses that the baby did not need to eat for a longer time than usual, and it cuts back on the milk available for the next nursing session. Your decreased milk supply leaves the baby hungry at the next nursing, prompting you to offer another bottle, thus setting up a vicious cycle. It does not take many days before you are tempted to give up nursing entirely because there was “not enough milk.” It is important to remember that there is no such thing as not enough milk. Your milk supply will drop off only if you interfere with milk production by substituting bottles of formula for nursing. Many new mothers inadvertently sabotage their breast-feeding efforts in this way.
Breast-feeding is not necessarily difficult or inconvenient. After all, until the relatively recent invention of formula, all babies were successfully breast-fed. If you plan on breast-feeding, learn all you can about the process. Be patient for the first few days while your baby learns to nurse. Above all, give yourself time. If you stick with breastfeeding for just two to three weeks, you may find that you enjoy it so much that many weeks or months of a delightful nursing relationship will surely follow.”

So as we’ve all said–if you want to breastfeed, do so, and then top up afterwards til your milk comes in if baby isn’t satisfied.
A hungry baby who isn’t getting anything isn’t going to be stimulating the breasts any further because he or she will be too busy screaming about an empty tummy, while mom sobs about what a horrible failure of a mother she already is because her baby is so miserable and she can’t do anything about it. Great way to start off motherhood, I must say.
ETA: IIRC, Dr. Tuteur wrote this before the most recent research about lactation failure came out. See “all babies were successfully breast-fed.” Well, they were…or they died.

MaineJen

That is fantastic for women who want to, or are able to, breastfeed. It does not make it necessary to browbeat women for whom breastfeeding is not a good choice, or is simply not working out, or is not what they want.

Roadstergal

“When a bottle of formula is substituted for a nursing session”

Which is why everyone in this thread is mentioning offering a bottle _after_ a nursing session. Stimulation unaffected, baby fed. No downside.

yentavegan

I am a lactation educator. I advise parents to bottle feed first and then offer the breast. This works to assure mother that her infant is not starving and it often gives the newborn the burst of energy needed to latch suck and swallow with gusto.

myrewyn

If your baby is weak and struggling to latch I can especially see the benefit to offering a bottle first but how do you know how much to let them drink and still have a good chance they will empty the breast before becoming full and falling asleep? I’m genuinely asking since I’m having a baby any day now and don’t see the usual evidence of my milk coming in like I did with my last two.

MaineJen

I would think offering only an ounce or 2 of bottle will take the edge of hunger off, but still leave them hungry enough to want to nurse. Newborns can’t drink much more than 2-4 ounces at a time…

yentavegan

If the newborn is nursing and passing meconium and sleeping blissfully between nursings, and if the baby is not losing 10 % of body weight…and the baby readily nurses 10-12 times over a 24 hour period there is no red flag warning that this infant requires a supplemental feed…HOWEVER mothers who do not experience noticeable breast heft increase and if the engorgement whoosh of milk coming in does not occur this is a red flag warning that supplements are the correct answer to a hungry/underfed infant.

myrewyn

My breasts have definitely gotten bigger and fuller but by late pregnancy with my other two I was soaking my shirts at night. I guess all I can do is wait and see. Thanks.

N

There are exceptions to everything I guess. My (really small) breasts did not change at all during any pregnancy. And yet I produced enough milk to feed the baby. With number 2 I got so much milk, that she was drowning in it. For number 3 I did not even get engorged in the early days. There seemed to be nothing. And yet there was enough, more than enough milk to feed him.

Heidi

I sincerely hope there are more people like you working with breastfeeding mothers. I never any real engorgement nor did my breasts increase during pregnancy and NO ONE asked during prenatal visits or at the hospital. I really thought for weeks I could get a full supply and pumped day and night. I thankfully was a-okay with formula and felt no guilt so everyone is doing great, but I wish I had known then I didn’t do anything to make it not work.

Roadstergal

I always appreciate your input, because I really admire the listening and changing you’ve been able to do, and of course your relevant experience.

During the newborn phase the urge to suck is often stronger than the need to feed…so during the early days before mom’s hormonally dependant whoosh of milk fills up her breasts, the bottle of supplement has no negative effect on initial milk production.

BeatriceC

This is how we did it with my oldest once he came off the NG tube and proved he could coordinate suck/swallow/breathe. He had a couple factors making things more difficult. I have huge boobs (32J or so before my first pregnancy, who knows what size during the early days of nursing), and had a massive oversupply with a firehose like letdown. The poor kid was having trouble latching onto boobs bigger than he was and then nearly drowning when let down happened. He was having difficulty latching and would be absolutely frantic. My mother convinced me to give him a half an ounce to an ounce of formula/expressed breastmilk (formula because pumps were expensive and not covered by insurance back then) first to get him calmed down, then try to latch him. After about a week and a half of this, he figured it out for the most part, and we went on to EBF until solids were introduced, and didn’t wean until 13 months.

mamajb

DHHS “Research shows that if 90 percent of families exclusively breast fed for 6 months, almost 1,000 infant deaths may be prevented annually and $13 billion would be saved in medical costs each year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health”.
AAP Infants who are breast-fed for the first six months have a 72 percent lower risk of hospitalization for lower respiratory tract infections, a 64 percent reduced risk for nonspecific gastrointestinal tract infections, a 58 percent risk reduction for the intestinal infection necrotizing enterocolitis in preterm infants, and a 27 percent to 42 percent reduction in allergic diseases in breast-fed infants, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reported.”

These organizations do not make up research. Yes, sadly babies die. Some breastfed babies die because their mothers are not informed as to what to look for and when to call the doctor. This is not an issue with breastmilk but a failure of our medical system to 1. Educate doctors in medical school about human lactation. 2. Educate nurses in nursing school about human lactation and an over all lack of support for breastfeeding mothers in Westernized countries – where breastfeeding is generally not accepted and hidden behind hooter hiders.

When breastfeeding is not going well, doctors, nurses and mothers should know that it is not and take steps to correct it.

KeeperOfTheBooks

Take just one tiny aspect of BFHI culture.
If the medical staff literally refuses (or isn’t allowed) to tell mom what her newborn’s weight is or how much weight her newborn has lost because telling her might discourage her from breastfeeding, how is mom supposed to make an informed decision to figure out why the baby isn’t getting enough food and what to do about it?

mamajb

I have never heard of such a thing. Are you saying that there are hospitals that do not tell the parents how much their newborn weighs????? I live in CA and EVERY mother I have worked with in the last 40 years knows how much their baby weighed at birth, how much the baby weighs when they go home and how much the baby weighs at every pedi. visit. I can’t believe this is a CA “thing”.

KeeperOfTheBooks

The hospital at which I delivered told me baby’s birth weight, of course, but not her subsequent weights until midway through day 3, when we went immediately from “baby’s eating just fine, lost a teenie bit of weight but that’s normal, good for you for breastfeeding” at every shift change/nurse visit to “your baby has lost well over ten percent of her body weight, this is totally inexcusable, if you don’t get her weight higher she won’t be discharged home with you.”
This is not terribly uncommon. Apparently, the idea is that if you tell mom that her baby has lost a fair bit of weight in the first couple of days, then she might–gasp!–supplement with formula, so you don’t tell her until the kid’s brain cells are really in danger due to weight loss and dehydration. Mind you, a bit of supplementation earlier than that very low point might keep baby from getting such low weights and blood sugars, but as we all know, formula is the devil, so…

Heidi

I had to drag the weight out of them and a percentage of loss. They weren’t volunteering it. I didn’t get supplementation for weight loss but low blood sugars but he had lost over 7% by the next day. I just shudder to think what could have happened if I’d turned down the second glucose test since I actually passed the initial screening. I barely got a GDM diagnosis and at the time I was a little miffed I got labeled high risk since I never had high readings. But hey, his sugar got tested and revealed my lactation failure and we’re all well and alive.

mamajb

ALL newborns lose weight! They NEED to. It’s a normal physiological occurrence. When mothers are told that, they do not freak out over it.
For the VAST MAJORITY of women, the more milk (and yes, colostrum is early MILK) that is removed, the more milk is made. When formula is given (when there is no medical reason) less milk is removed and therefore less milk is made. i AM NOT SAYING THAT ONE 1 OZ. BOTTLE OF FORMULA WILL AFFECT BREASTFEEDING. But, topping off breastfeeding often, will affect production – in most women. When milk is not “moving”, more milk will not be made. It’s a law of supply and demand. It’s worked pretty well since time began.
Back to weight loss. More women are getting IV fluids in labor along with pitocin (which is a anti-diuretic), and boluses of fluid with epidurals.
We are learning that baby’s born with these interventions are retaining excess fluid that is skewing the birth weight. These babies are peeing 3-4 diapers on day one when the normal amount in the first 24 hours is 1. It is seriously being considered to consider the baby’s weight after 24 hours to be the most accurate.

Azuran

Please explain how babies NEED to lose weight?

Funny, I topped off pretty much each feeding for over a week. And now I produce so much my baby is choking all the time.

mamajb

It has to do with metabolism. All babies lose fluid weight after birth. It is normal.
A healthy newborn is expected to lose 7% to 10% of the birth weight, but should regain that weight within the first 2 weeks or so after birth.
Obviously you are blessed with a very good milk supply and you could afford to top off. If your baby is choking all the time you probably have an overactive let-down as well as abundant milk.
For MOST mothers that have a more normal supply, topping off with formula inadvertently sabotages their efforts to breastfeed.
As Dr. Amy stated in her book,

“When a bottle of formula is substituted for a nursing session. Your body does not know that the baby received a bottle. It senses that the baby did not need to eat for a longer time than usual, and it cuts back on the milk available for the next nursing session. Your decreased milk supply leaves the baby hungry at the next nursing, prompting you to offer another bottle, thus setting up a vicious cycle. It does not take many days before you are tempted to give up nursing entirely because there was “not enough milk.” It is important to remember that there is no such thing as not enough milk. Your milk supply will drop off only if you interfere with milk production by substituting bottles of formula for nursing. Many new mothers inadvertently sabotage their breast-feeding efforts in this way.”

Fewer than 50% of babies lose more than 8% by 72 hrs.
Neonatal weight loss is common.
Common does not nessarily imply normal, nor risk free, nor physiological.

Azuran

Being normal and being needed are two extremely different things.

You are confused, I couldn’t ‘afford to top off’ because I had oversupply.
I topped off because I had no milk and my baby was hungry. It took 4 days before I started having milk. and another week before I had enough to satisfy my baby.

Lilly de Lure

Which is why you offer the bottle AFTER the breast rather than before – that way the breast gets all the draining and stimulation the baby can give it but the baby still gets enough to eat (the latter being the main point of breast feeding at all in case you had forgotten – all those much trumpeted immunoglobulins etc are all very nice but not much use to a baby that is starving).

yentavegan

I often suggest offering the bottle first, address the hunger and then offer the breast. Many mothers find this advice useful.

Azuran

When my baby was too frustrated to latch, I use to give her 5ml of formula then breastfeed. It allowed her to calm down and latch

Who?

Funny how Dr T is the font of all wisdom when you agree with her, and a vicious charlaten when you do not.

And ‘normal’ is not necessarily anything like okay or adequate or desirable.

Roadstergal

“It has to do with metabolism”

That is absolutely true. These little not-fully-developed creatures are scorchingly metabolically active, as they grow and develop. If they don’t get sufficient caloric intake, they have to sabotage their own stores at a time that they are growing bone, skin, immune cells, and BRAIN CELLS, and they’re going to lose weight.

Give me some evidence that early starvation is beneficial to babies.

myrewyn

“It has to do with metabolism” = “I used kind of a big word there and hope you won’t ask me to elaborate”

Heidi

She’s merely proving that if she was there lactation consultant for Landon and his mom, most likely she would have let this occur.

KeeperOfTheBooks

Of course some weight loss is normal. But it plays merry hell with mom’s psyche to literally be told at one minute that baby’s fine, and the next to be scolded for “letting” her baby drop to over 10% weight loss when she didn’t even know that was an issue in the first place. And that’s not even touching how baby is affected by losing so much weight!
As for it working “pretty well since time began”–survivor’s bias, much?!
A baby should be somewhat satiated at the breast sometimes in the first few days before milk comes in. DD never, ever was: she’d scream and scream and scream, only latching after a very long fight, and suckling frantically for a bit before unlatching to scream some more. I heard no swallowing. The only time she calmed down was after we finally gave her some formula via a SNS on day 3.
My milk did not come in for ten days. During that time period, the lactivists’ definition of support was to tell me that maybe I didn’t want my daughter in the first place (LLL leader), that I just wasn’t trying hard enough to produce milk (IBCLC at the hospital), and that it’s normal for newborns to scream hysterically any moment that they’re awake (all but one nurse at that BFHI hospital–God bless and keep that one sane woman.) Do you really think it would have been better for her to have not eaten for ten days? An ounce of formula wouldn’t have been nearly enough.

Roadstergal

“ALL newborns lose weight! They NEED to”

So if an EBF baby whose mom was lucky enough to have abundant colostrum and very quick milk was not losing any weight, you would warn the mom to pump and dump instead of feeding the baby, because the baby needs to lose weight?

The Bofa on the Sofa

Apparently….

It makes no friggin sense at all. Babies don’t NEED to lose weight. They can, and usually do, but that doesn’t have to happen.

But then again, these are the moronic depths you have to sink to in order to maintain your ideology.

Roadstergal

I would say that it’s the craziest shit I’ve ever heard, but right down-thread sabelmouse is saying that shaken baby syndrome doesn’t really exist. So it’s not even the craziest shit on this page.

Ken S., As Seen On Watch Lists

Child abusers sure do have a strong incentive to shift the blame away from themselves…

Roadstergal

They sure do, but those who defend them without that motivation are something else altogether.

The Bofa on the Sofa

Again, the moronic depths you have to sink to in order to maintain your ideology.

Although this isn’t so much necessarily, this is just one of those moronic things anti-vaxxers cling on to try to justify their ideology. You can be anti-vax and recognize SBS.

Azuran

Obviously, formula feeding moms are also strickly instructed to not feed their baby until they are full, but to give set amount.
The weight of the babies is then very closely followed to make sure that they lose enough weight. If they don’t, mother is instructed to feed less.

myrewyn

I was scratching my head over the NEED to lose weight as well. I guess when you’re unfamiliar with how the scientific method works, you can just take the result and work backwards from there until you come up with a reason that fits your cause.

I’m reminded of a biology teacher one of my brothers had at a Christian school (which I luckily did not go to). If a student asked a question he couldn’t answer, instead of admitting he didn’t know, he would say “perhaps we’ll never know! That’s just the way God made them!”

yentavegan

I have fought mightily with lactation consultants to explain /justify allowing a newborn to dip way below the 10% weightloss by explaining it away as due to maternal iv fluids. Many mothers with an ample milk supply never have infants fall below the 10% even though mother had IV fluids and a c/section. It is not true and not healthy to allow a baby to lose excess weight and blame it on “interventions”

Charybdis

You tell ’em, Yenta! Good for you! You speak their language, so you *might* stand a better chance of being heard.

Charybdis

Mothers that have IV’s, Pitocin, and epidurals are NOT delivering babies all swollen up like Violet Beauregard from Willy Wonka (Take her to the juicing room!). They are not so bloated that they need Lasix or other diuretic. A little bit of weight loss can be tolerated, but to claim that signs of dehydration and hunger/starvation can be IGNORED because “it’s normal” is barking mad.

MaineJen

I was on IV fluids, pitocin and antibiotics while in labor with my daughter (good times!!)…she was born at just over 6 pounds and, if anything, was a skinny baby. She certainly wasn’t swollen.

She also latched right away, at only 15 minutes old, despite me having an epidural. Think of that!

Azuran

is there even a study that show babies are heavier by a significant amount when the mother gets fluids and by how much? If this has been studied and caused significant changes in weight, the % by which weight is raised by IV fluids would be well known and taken into consideration when calculating weight loss.
Seems to me like they are just way overblowing this to fit their agenda.

Roadstergal

Thing is, women don’t get IV fluids willy-nilly. You generally get them when you’re dehydrated, to keep you from being dehydrated. So the lactivsts are basically arguing that every woman who isn’t dehydrated – even if it’s just because they had a fast, easy labor – is birthing a swollen balloon-baby…?

Azuran

I had fluids because of the epidural. But it wasn’t as if I was loaded with fluids. I has less than 1L by the time I had my c-section.
However, I did have massive fluid build up in my legs in the last month of my pregnancy. Funny how IV fluids is supposed to raise the baby’s weight but not pregnancy induced fluids retention.

mamajb

Your words not mine.
They are able to pee out the extra fluid. As I said earlier, normal babies are expect to wet ONE diaper the first 24 hours, TWO wet diapers on day 2, THREE wet diapers on day 3…….etc. etc.
When a baby is peeing 3 wet diapers the first 24 hours and the mother received significant (hours of) IV fluids it is being recognized that this factor has to be taken into account regarding that infant’s weight loss.
It is barking mad when starvation and dehydration are ignored by hospital nurses and the baby’s pediatrician.

mamajb

Why isn’t Dr. Amy chiming in on this??? I know there has to be some agreement on at least some of this.

Amazed

Dr Amy disagrees. And no, hydration in labour do not swell babies in any considerable amount. Certainly not so much that it can have any measurable input on weight loss. And when it does, it’s usually because the mother received an extra high dose of hydration. Meaning, birth had gone mightily awry and she needed more fluids than usual.

Roadstergal

I would contend that it doesn’t affect the baby even if mom gets a big dose. This is a complex, well-regulated system, and if mom is severely dehydrated, getting her the hydration she needs won’t bypass her bloodstream and go straight to the baby.

The burden is on Mama JB to show that IV hydration has any effect on neonate weight.

Heidi

I got the equivalent in fluids I would have likely drank if I hadn’t been in labor. I don’t even think I finished a bag before the baby popped out.

mamajb

You speak for the doctor? She knows about normal physiology and the normal range of infant weight loss and why that happens.
Hours of IV fluids can and do affect the baby’s birth weight. A baby that wets 3-4 diapers in the first 24 hours will register a greater weight loss that a baby that pees the normal/expected 1 diaper.
It is not rocket science.
Dr. Amy, give me a break here…..

US National Library of Medicine
National Institutes of Health:
“Conclusions”
Timing and amounts of maternal IV fluids appear correlated to neonatal output and newborn weight loss. Neonates appear to experience diuresis and correct their fluid status in the first 24 hours. We recommend a measurement at 24 hours, instead of birth weight, for baseline when assessing weight change.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3174114/

J Obstet Gynecol Neonatal Nurs. 2012
“Exploratory analyses suggest that breastfed newborn weight loss increases when intrapartum volumes infused are >2500 mLs. Care providers are encouraged to consider volumes of IV fluid infused intrapartum as a factor that may have contributed to early newborn weight loss in the first 48 h of life.”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22834720

You know how science works, don’t you? If you make the claim, you have to provide the citation.

Also, blogs and newspaper stories aren’t studies. You provided a lot of links to one actual study, a very small and uncontrolled observational study:http://internationalbreastfeedingjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1746-4358-6-9
They made a lot of comparisons and made much of what looks mostly like a statistical blip. There’s a lot of problems with the statistics, especially with the tired old trick of measuring lots of things on a small sample until you get the result you want, but in the end, they saw a difference that was well within the noise (and all well below 10%), with a big p-value. What’s missing, and really needs to be there, is measurements of dehydration in the mom. Are they really seeing mini-Violet Beauergaurds being pushed out, or are babies of dehydrated moms dehydrated themselves, and losing less because they have less to lose? That’s the reasonable alternative hypothesis that was not even considered in the Discussion.

They did have one finding that actually looked statistically significant, and that was the positive correlation between delayed onset of lactogenesis II and newborn weight loss at 72hr. That had a p < 0.001, way smaller than any of their other findings – yet, they bury it. Interesting.

Amazed

OMFG! Do you even READ the sources you post?

The only reputable source out of the four you mention says that IV fluids less than 2 500 mLs are unlikely to have any clinically meaningful effect on how much a baby weighs.

Once again, I notice that you suffer from chronic disability to tell reputable sources from the ones who claim what you want to hear. BFmed being equal to ncbi? Observational “studies” published in breastfeeding journals compared to randomized trials?

No wonder you are unable to grasp how the teachings you swallow up and preach killed poor Landon. You’re a menace to every mother and baby who you come in contact with and who have anything but perfect start of breastfeeding.

The Bofa on the Sofa

Cut her some slack, she is just the messenger.

Charybdis

Too bad a lot of these so-called messengers can’t be like the original Marathon messenger. Parachute in, gasp out their message and then drop dead.

Azuran

Here’s the thing: There AREN’T different recommendation for expected weight loss between babies that has fluids and babies who don’t.
This can mean either two things:
-Either it has not been studied enough for us to know how much it actually affects babies. Which means that you are making unfounded claims when you say it matter.
-Or there has been studied, which showed it didn’t matter.

mamajb

No there aren’t different recommendations for expected weight loss….yet. There are serious discussions within health care organizations about it though. Until there is consensus babies that have lost >9-10% of their birth weight need close and frequent follow-up with their doctors.

Azuran

and on what studies are these supposed discussions are based?

Amazed

I’ll take this post to mean that you didn’t pay attention to your wording. Normal babies? Coming from a LC, that bears a frightening similarity to the cult of natural = good, interventions in birth = bad and not normal.

Roadstergal

“It is barking mad when starvation and dehydration are ignored by hospital nurses and the baby’s pediatrician.”

I have had IV fluids with 3 of my 5 babies..( I know this information is anecdotal but…) My 3 IV newborns did not weigh more at birth, nor did they lose more weight before my milk came in. than their 2 non- maternal-IV siblings. There was no impact on my milk production due to me having IV fluids.

rosewater1

When I’m working as a nursing assistant, and a mom asks me, “How much does he/she weigh?”-I look it up and tell them. Never occurred to me that they didn’t have the right to know.

Charybdis

Parents are told the newborn’s weight at birth, or shortly thereafter, along with length and sex (if not already known). What they are NOT told is how much the baby is losing (or not) when they are checked while still in the hospital. Or they are told something rather unclear like “She’s lost a little bit of weight, nothing too much, but let’s get her breastfeeding as much as possible so it doesn’t fall further. Would you like me to help you now or send the LC in?” No mention of a percentage loss or what the weight is at that point in time. THIS is the issue.

mamajb

Most all the hospitals in my area do infant checks in the room in the presence of the parent(s). So they know the baby’s weight. Of course, in hospitals that do all that in the nursery, parents have the right and responsibility to ask and expect answers to their questions.

Heidi

Seriously? Wow. The primary responsibility lies with the medical staff to tell parents, and not just tell parents but recommend intervention if deemed necessary. Otherwise they are going to assume all is well.

I mean, I worked in the ER. We don’t just perform an EKG and not inform them of a heart attack and just let them sit there not treating them until they ask.

Roadstergal

You shouldn’t even let them know if they have risk factors for a heart attack. There’s no sense in stressing them out with that kind of information.

Heidi

I know when baby was born, they drop some tests to send off. I also think they do a galactosemia test right after birth. I would super hope they wouldn’t let me proceed to breastfeed if the test came back positive just because I didn’t think to ask. Or not call and inform of a medical condition they discovered.

mamajb

BOTH medical staff and parents hold some responsibility for the exchange of information. If parents feel they did not get the information the feel they should have – OR – were not given answers to their questions, they need to report that as a grievance to their facility.

Heidi

You are making a lot of assumptions. The parents may not even know to ask. And they are putting trust that the medical staff will keep them informed of vital info. And evidently some members would not think it important to mention a 10% weight loss because they believe in myths.

maidmarian555

I was told by a midwife my son’s 9% loss was totally normal. It didn’t occur to me that she might not be being totally honest about that. Why would it? It’s a pretty poor indictment of post-natal care if parents are supposed to assume that all medical professionals are big fat liars and we should pre-research every eventuality so we know what questions to ask. If I’d have wanted to be a bloody midwife I’d have studied to be one, on what planet can any layperson research all of this stuff properly and understand it? We need to be able to trust those responsible for our care that they will be honest and tell us what’s going on in a way that we can understand.

myrewyn

How are they to know what to ask when every professional is telling them everything is fine?

mamajb

At some point, a patient has to decide if they trust the doctor they hired and the staff at the facility they chose to give birth.
I think – generally speaking – if your health care provider says that “everything is fine” you can believe it. Of course frequent follow-up office visits and phone calls to answer questions are part of a parent’s responsibility.

Heidi_storage

This whole conversation is about people who trusted their healthcare providers, and about how those providers failed their patients.

Amy Tuteur, MD

I wrote this post about people like you. You’re like a creationist; you will stick to your predetermined conclusion regardless of the evidence. The big difference between you and a creationist, however, is that your wishful thinking can kill.

Actually Amy, my conclusions, beliefs and the way I teach have changed considerably in the last 40 years. I do my best to stay informed and up to date through regular seminars and CEU’s.

Amy Tuteur, MD

You read propaganda from sources that tell you what you want to hear. That’s why you know so little about the reality of breastfeeding risks and complications.

mamajb

I do more than read. I make a point of attending seminars, lectures, and classes that have featured many respected speakers, M.D’s, PhD’s as well as recognized experts in the field of childbirth and human lactation.
As a once licensed physician, did you regard the NIH, CDC, AMA, ACOG and AAP as loons and their research crap? Even though, at that time, we did not know what we know know about what constitutes the Gold Standard of maternity and pediatric care.
Just wondering.

And all your seminars, lectures, and classes would have led to you being one of the professionals who killed baby Landon with their lack of knowledge and blind devotion to breastfeeding.

Sad.

mamajb

And, as a physician, I know your hope and desire was for your patients to trust you and the way you practiced medicine.
And, I know that through your career you met other physicians that practiced differently – and their patients trusted them.

myrewyn

are you for real? Sure I put some thought into selecting my OB and where I wanted to deliver but once I’m in the middle of it, I’m not going to second-guess my providers when they are ALL telling me things are fine.

Heidi

I like how she assumes all women have the privilege of choice when it comes to choosing doctors and hospitals! There are towns that have zero OBs, there are people whose insurance or lack thereof that leaves them with little to no choice. Seems pretty common from what I read that women only have the choice of BFHI hospitals where these 10%+ weight losses cuz IV fluids are like totes no biggie.

mamajb

And what about your mothering instincts?? They do exist. If you see and think that something is actually NOT “fine”, do you just go along with them or do you continue to pose your ongoing questions to your provider or seek another [second] opinion??
I’ll tell you what, that’s what I would do.

myrewyn

Yep. It was definitely the mom’s fault.

mamajb

Again, your words not mine.
I put the blame of this heart wrenching, unfortunate death squarely on the shoulders of the professionals that she trusted.
That said, I know many a mother, who’s concerns were brushed off or trivialized – who felt something was not right, to seek a second opinion. I am sure Landon’s mother wishes she had.
The only solace in all this (hopefully) is that those involved in this horrible situation were punished.

The Bofa on the Sofa

Again, your words not mine.

No, those are certainly the implications of your words.

If you don’t mean to imply that, then don’t say things that imply that. All we have here is your words, and what you say betrays you.

If people are drawing conclusions from your words that you don’t like, then you better use different words.

But that isn’t what’s going on. What’s actually happening is that you are blowing smoke, and then when you get called on it, you have to back pedal like mad.

Say what you mean. Mean what you say. Quit blowing shit out of your ass.

Lilly de Lure

Ah, the old blame shift, the last resort of cranks/charlatans whose ideology has had a consequence they are trying to crawl away from.

Do you think that people here are so incapable of parsing a post that we wouldn’t spot that your second paragraph directly contradicts the pious platitudes of the first, which in this context amount to little more than gaslighting?

Both your original post and this one directly blame the mother for the death of baby Landon – in this case citing the “mother instincts” that, if she hadn’t been a crap mother, (I know you don’t have the guts to come out and say that but it is the absolute implication of both posts, particularly the one above where you directly compare her unfavourably with “many a mother you have known”) would have been sufficient to save baby Landon. Both of these posts are truly repellent and any decent person would realise that, retract both posts and apologise profusely and publicly for them to Landon’s mother.

Charybdis

Certainly. But if *everyone* is telling you that “everything is just fine” (nurses, LC’s IBCLC’s, pediatrician, doctors, etc), and you aren’t convinced that this is so, because your baby is CONSTANTLY nursing, crying, screaming and unsettled and you cannot express/pump more that a couple of drops of milk, then what recourse do you have? In the hospital, I mean. The nurses won’t bring you formula to feed your hungry baby because you stupidly said that you were planning on breastfeeding and you have to listen to a spiel stating how formula is just slightly better than toxic waste from Chernobyl and require you to sign a waiver before they grudgingly give you formula. The baby is having brick dust in their diaper, which is a sign of dehydration and you are told not to worry, that this is “normal”. No pacifiers to provide soothing sucking are allowed. Just “keep latching the baby”, “keep nursing”, “nurse more” is all you are told. Along with how *desperately* important breastfeeding is and how small your newborn’s stomach actually is (which is incorrect and misleading information), This is the so-called “breastfeeding support” women receive in BFHI facilities.
Now, let’s move on to the follow-up visits to the pediatrician after discharge from the hospital. Your baby keeps falling down the growth curve charts, until they are in the lowest 2% or fall off the chart completely. You are exclusively breastfeeding, of course, and you can’t understand why your baby is not growing and gaining weight. The pediatrician recommends formula supplementation, but the nurse and/or LC says not to. Because you can “do things” to increase your supply: power pump, fenugreek supplements, oatmeal, “Mother’s Milk” teas, take domperidone, etc. The LC/nurse tell you to make sure the doctor is using the “breastfeeding growth charts” because breastfed babies grow differently than formula fed ones. Any questions or concerns you have are waved away or condescendingly explained to you (your baby’s stomach is TINY, they aren’t really hungry, ALL babies NEED to lose weight, 20+ hours of nursing in a 24 hour period is NORMAL, so is brick dust in the diaper, cluster feeding, colostrum is richer and more concentrated than mature milk, so babies need very little of it, 10% weight loss is NORMAL, nothing to be concerned about, all babies are jaundiced, breastfeeding doesn’t hurt, if it does, you are doing it wrong, tongue tie, lip tie, both lip AND tongue ties, revision of said ties, every woman can breastfeed, lactation failure is so, so rare, supplementation is not necessary, just nurse more to increase your supply, etc). Not to mention the fact that women are often told to ignore the pediatrician’s advice to supplement the baby with formula, because SHILL!!!!
If the so-called professionals are “advising” you to breastfeed at all costs and definitely NOT hearing your concerns about your baby’s hunger/growth/weight gain, and shut down any mention of formula, how are you supposed to get quality, unbiased advice from anyone?

Azuran

I did, multiple times, yet I got no answer until after 48 hours by asking a nursing student. All the other time, people kept saying they didn’t know, but they would go and check and never came back.
They also didn’t tell me she was at 7% when we got discharge. I only know because I calculated it myself from her release paper when we got home.
Indeed, parents have the right to an answer. The problem, as we are saying, is that they don’t get it.

mamajb

File a complaint with your facility!
A 7% loss is within normal limits for a healthy newborn. Of course you continued regular visits with your baby’s doctor?

Azuran

My baby was at 7% on day 4 (which is the limit that my hospital sets for an acceptable weight loss) DESPITE being supplemented. Meaning that without supplementation, it is extremely likely she would have lost over 10%

Amy Tuteur, MD

That’s based on a theoretical model created by a lactivist, but there’s no evidence that it reflects reality. No one can point to a single term baby who has died as a direct result of properly prepared infant formula. Can you?

mamajb

Are you suggesting that every major health organization in the world and every health department in the US is basing their support of breastfeeing (as a public health issue) are being duped by the “lactivist industry”?? That they are not basing their recommendations on the plethora of research that has been done in the last 20 years?
Are you suggesting that some babies are not allergic to various formulas and do not require human milk (mothers of donated) to survive???
If you are, you are deluded.

Amy Tuteur, MD

Absolutely. Read their papers; it’s all based on mathematical modeling. There is no real world data to support these claims. I’ve debated Melissa Bartick on this very issue and she can’t produce any real world data either.

Nick Sanders

White Hat Bias is a thing.

Azuran

To be fair, some babies (like myself) are allergic to breastmilk and need formula to survive.

mamajb

And as you welll know, powdered formula is not sterile and there have been recalls on formula over the years for various contaminates.
Food Safety / CDC Informs About Cronobacter in Infant Formula
Cronobacter in Infant Formula, formerly called Enterobacter sakazaki, a pathogen found in the environment that can survive under very dry conditions.
This bacteria has been found in the past in powdered infant formula, powdered milk, herbal teas, and starches. The government is especially concerned about infants, who are more susceptible to serious complications from bacterial infections.
In fact, Cronobacter infections are often deadly in young infants, but reporting this illness isn’t required, unlike infections caused by Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria.

This isn’t as worrisome to you as breastmilk???

Amy Tuteur, MD

It’s far less common than insufficient breastmilk, so if you’re concerned about Cronobacter, you should be horrified by the number of babies harmed and killed as a result of insufficient breastmilk.

BTW, I showed you Landon’s autopsy report. Are you going to acknowledge that he died of dehydration?

Nick Sanders

As I pointed out to the last person who whined that formula powder isn’t sterile: neither are boobs.

crazy grad mama

Ha, yes, I was thinking the same thing! Especially when I had a clogged duct that got infected—for which the treatment was, of course, “nurse more.”

Sterile is a also a silly standard to apply because, outside of medical settings, nothing is sterile. Even very clean, safe things. Steam-cleaning my breast pump parts sanitized them, it did not sterilize them.

mamajb

Nick, no, boobs are not sterile. That’s a good thing. The bacteria on the mothers skin is beneficial to the baby’s developing microbiome. And the Montgomery’s glands on the areola secrete a substance that lubricate the nipple to keep it healthy. Montgomery glands also produce antimicrobial factors that help prevent bad germs from growing. Pretty cool huh?

Heidi

Oh yeah, those Montgomery glands did a baby who starved to DEATH a whole lotta good. Eeeermigod soooooo kewl! Can you hear yourself?!??

mamajb

Are we just discussing a tragedy here or is this a forum to discuss more???
Yes, Heidi, you are right. Montgomery glands had nothing to do with this baby’s death. That was never the point in this thread. The topic was the fact that powdered formula is not sterile and has been linked to illness in infants.

Heidi

Yes, this here is about a tragedy. Can you read? You are the one trying to sweep this death under the rug.

mamajb

Well, tell that to the others.
I am not trying to sweep this under the rug. This was a preventable tragedy. A tragedy that could have been prevented by education of the 1. doctor, 2. nurses, and mother. And any lactation consultant that was closely involved.
And, yes Heidi, I can read.

Heidi

A tragedy that could have been prevented by formula but people like you are pushing for a culture where formula is demonized and breastfeeding problems are denied. You’ve spent days arguing this baby didn’t die of dehydration and starvation! I have no reason to believe you would have intervened if Landon and his mom were your patients. You’d have assured her his weight loss was normal, told her formula was going to hurt her supply, gone on with “facts” about how seeewper kewl breastfeeding is and how deadly formula is, and then when he died insist it had nothing to do with starvation.

MaineJen

There WERE lactation consultants involved. They told her everything was fine, her baby was cluster feeding and she should just keep on breastfeeding. And he died.

rosewater1

That’s the closest you’ll probably ever be able to come to admitting that this baby didn’t need to die & were it not for the insistence that breastfeeding was working, likely wouldn’t have.

It doesn’t mean that ALL breastfeeding is bad and evil It doesn’t mean no one can breastfeed exclusively.

Anything can go wrong. Anything can be problematic.

Do you REALLY care about breastfeeding? About making it work for as many people as possible? If you do, then acknowledge that there are problems and issues that CAN happen. And are happening. And that families are suffering.

Or do you care more about pontificating endlessly online and telling everyone how wrong we are?

Amy Tuteur, MD

She’s a lactation consultant. She’s trying to justify the fact that she’s been spouting misinformation, and potentially harming babies, for years.

rosewater1

That makes her even more disgusting. The lactation consultants I work with can be-rather fervent-in their zeal for breastfeeding. But they would NOT let something like this happen.

Azuran

But a baby can totally also get infection from a contaminated breast or contaminated breastmilk. It isn’t magical.

mamajb

You are right. There are some documented reasons why a mother should NOT breastfeed.

If the mother has been infected with HIV or has AIDS. For such mothers human milk banks may be contacted if they wish to provide breast milk for their babies rather than infant formula.

Many medications taken by the mother may pass onto the baby via breast milk. Some medications may harm the newborn baby if ingested with breast milk.

Mothers with cancer who are taking cancer chemotherapy medications also cannot breastfeed their babies.

Mothers who are undergoing radiation therapies especially of the chest are also not allowed to breastfeed until their therapy regimen is over.

Mothers with untreated and active tuberculosis infections are not advised to breastfeed. T

Mothers infected with human T-cell lymphotropic virus type I or type II should not breast feed their babies.

Mothers who are taking illegal drugs like cocaine, PCP, heroin, marijuana etc. should not breastfeed their babies. Smoking and alcohol in general should be avoided by lactating mothers.

Babies with a condition called galactosemia wherein they cannot digest or tolerate breast milk are not able to breastfeed. These babies must be fed a special diet that is free of lactose and galactose. NOT traditional formula.

However, a mother with a breast infection (mastitis) can and should continue breastfeeding. I am not sure what you think will contaminate the breast…? Especially if the mother has access to a bathtub or shower.

maidmarian555

Here in the UK we have an issue with asylum seeking mothers with HIV being unable to access help with feeding their children. They can’t even get formula on prescription so have to make do by stretching the tiny amount of money they do have to feed their babies, whilst often neglecting their own diets. The idea that these vulnerable women can just ‘call a milk bank’ and be handed out breastmilk is about as far from their actual lived reality as you can possibly get.

J Int AIDS Soc. 2017 Feb 20;20(1):1-8. doi: 10.7448/IAS.20.1.21251.
Postnatal HIV transmission in breastfed infants of HIV-infected women on ART: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
Bispo S1, Chikhungu L2, Rollins N3, Siegfried N4, Newell ML5.
“Postnatal transmission rates were 1.08 (95% CI: 0.32-1.85) at six and 2.93 (95% CI: 0.68-5.18) at 12 months.”
(that’s 1.08% for 6mo and 2.93% for 12mo)
At the same time, food banks such as the Trussell Trust in the UK, won’t give out formula so as to “avoid undermining” breastfeeding — so HIV+ve mums can’t access formula from there, either.
The interest in this issue from BF support/advocacy people is precisely zero. (except to handwave away the “irritating” data from a very large amount of real data on the, er real transmission risk). Oh, and to avoid ever discussing the (unknown, but concerning) risks about ARV toxicity via breastmilk.
1000 HIV+ve mothers give birth in the UK every year. If they all BF to 12 months, back of the envelope gives us nearly 30 HIV transmissions to babies thru breastfeeding alone. (not including the ones you would also see thru preg and childbirth). Those babies shouldn’t have to start their lives HIV positive.

evidencebasedbreastfeeding

Oh, to add — the NAT report also alludes to BabyFriendly making it difficult for HIV+ve mothers to be given access to formula, due to their specific policies on formula provision.

myrewyn

Seems that a woman’s HIV status should be part of her medical record and she shouldn’t even have to ask.

evidencebasedbreastfeeding

It should, but apparently Baby Friendly is too focussed around BF promotion efforts in the general population and hasn’t quite got its head around the fact that there are some specific clinical scenarios where BF most definitely is *not* recommended (and then to ensure these are appropriately factored into best practice within maternity units). So for example baby friendly mat units simply can’t prescribe formula and sterilisation equipment for HIV+ve mothers. What worries me substantially is the line of reasoning that goes down in BF support circles, that there is “virtually zero” risk of transmitting HIV thru breastfeeding (any suggestion otherwise is apparently a distortion from those who are either overly risk averse or in receipt of funding from formula companies), and that because HIV+ve mums would be on the receiving end of stigma if they were to FF (because it might out their status), they should therefore be supported to BF.

Lilly de Lure

That’s just – beyond insane, its like babies are just some sort of squalling byproduct of the whole exciting maternal lactation journey thing rather than the main point of the thing.

Roadstergal

Wow, that is the most insane shit I’ve heard for _official policy_. These poor mums.

Ask Eliza Jane Scofield about how you don’t get HIV through infected breastmilk. (Yes, she might have gotten it in utero, but still.)

Box of Salt

Roadstergal: we’ll have to ask either Eliza Jane’s father or Dr Jay Gordon instead.

maidmarian555

Well that report makes for some pretty depressing reading. I really hope it spurs some action, I mean, it’s such a simple and cost-effective fix it’s completely baffling that it hasn’t already been implemented. Especially when they take so much care during pregnancy to reduce transmission rates. You’re right about the lactivists, I see so many utterly thoughtless comments like the one above suggesting that women can just call a milk bank and donor milk will magically be there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen even one of them say that they’ve actually donated any milk themselves though, let alone run a campaign so that women that really shouldn’t breastfeed (such as those living with HIV) could have access to an abundant supply of donated milk. When you confront them they just (like the commenter I responded to) don’t reply at all.

Azuran

I wasn’t even talking about all this. Simply about how frequent basic contamination is.
You raised concern about cronobacter contaminating formula.
Well, the same thing can happen to basically any food, including breastmilk. Even if you can shower, the breast is skin, it has bacteria, they often leak milk, milk soaked clothes could lead to bacterial growth, you touch them with your hands, babies touch them with their hand, their face, their mouth, might even rub their nose against them. There are a lot of way that potentially pathogenic bacteria could end up on a nipple and in a breastfed baby’s mouth.
The exact same is true with pumped breastmilk.

Lilly de Lure

A shower or bath? I hate to point this out but unless the woman in question happens to be Daenerys Targaryan it at best medically ill-advised and at worst impossible for her to either bath or shower in water hot enough to prevent bacteria growing on any part of her skin, breasts included.

KeeperOfTheBooks

I can give you one example of something that could contaminate the breast.
As I mentioned above, I had to supplement. Because I was neck-deep in the idea that only bad mothers didn’t breastfeed, I used a SNS to do so. However, the BFHI hospital at which I delivered had a policy of not educating moms on how to safely prepare or store formula because doing so might mean they would use formula. I didn’t sleep more than an hour or so at a time for the first couple of weeks, and wasn’t capable of rational thought like “oh, hey, maybe this shouldn’t sit out all night.” So my nipples were constantly bathing in a solution of formula that had sat at room temp for several hours. This led to a very nasty infection on my part, though thank goodness it was just me and not poor DD.
One other thing about bacteria: because I had been told that any time DD cried I needed to nurse her immediately, I often didn’t bathe for 3+ days at a time after she was born. While not a microbiologist, I suspect that a warm, dark, damp environment with lots of sugar (breastmilk and formula alike) is a great medium for bacterial growth.

Charybdis

MRSA, candida, streptococcus, e.coli, salmonella, mycobacteria and Cryptococcus can all contaminate the breast and cause mastitis.

sdsures

“However, a mother with a breast infection (mastitis) can and should continue breastfeeding. ”

Even if doing so causes her agony and she has formula available?? You’re sadistic.

A number of folks claim that pushing “feels good” during delivery. A lot of people claim otherwise, that it hurts like hell. Which is right? Depends on the person and their circumstances at the time. Same with draining a breast affected with mastitis. Infected tissue is painful and manipulating it can be excruciating, so even though draining a breast with mastitis is part of the treatment for it, it doesn’t mean that it will be pleasurable for the woman. If it does “feel good”, then great. But refusing to acknowledge the fact that it might be painful and not a pleasant experience for the mother is callous.

momofone

Oh ok. So not being sterile is good when it’s breasts and bad when it’s formula.

Nick Sanders

The bacteria on the mothers skin is beneficial to the baby’s developing microbiome.

Prove it.

Roadstergal

…crickets.

MaineJen

We have mention of the microbiome!

I’ve got Bingo.

mamajb

Like you think our microbiome does not exist???

sdsures

Not to the magical extent that you do.

MaineJen

It exists. But no one yet knows the significance of having certain gut bacteria (beyond the obvious detriment of having H. Pylori).

Roadstergal

I’m very interested in this microbiome of which you speak! I asked a few questions above that an expert such as yourself should have no issues addressing.

Hmm, I don’t see anything in there to define what a healthy microbiome is, or that addresses any of the questions I asked. Interestingly, Nature v486 pp207–214 specifically notes that healthy microbiomes are incredibly diverse and vary massively from person to person, and v486 222–227 notes that it varies greatly with geography. So how do you know with such precision that sucking on a tit confers a good one?

Azuran

For that matter, how does sucking on a tit differs from sucking on any other body part?

Roadstergal

My fingers are very appealing to babies, for some reason. I bet I have affected the microbiome of many a friend’s baby.

Someone really should send Mr. Ray a fruit basket with a nice card thanking him for setting the gold standard for insanity.

Ken S., As Seen On Watch Lists

You are just educated stupid!!

Nick Sanders

Right? Even if it’s proved that sucking on mom’s nipple offers microbiome related health benefits to the baby that formula doesn’t, could that not be replicated by sucking on mom’s finger?

The Bofa on the Sofa

Or Dad’s nipples?

(cue Family Guy clip)

Azuran

Wow, you cited wikipedia (which btw, is very clear about the fact that we don’t even know what a ‘healthy’ microbiome is.)

mamajb

Exactly! But we are learning. And quite quickly.
We know enough to recommend that all babies [breastfed or not] get immediate skin-to-skin contact after birth and especially at risk babies that are in the NICU, Look up Kangaroo Care.

Azuran

My point is: we dont know enough to make any valid recommendation.

Roadstergal

You are pretending to be enough of an authority on the microbiome to state with certainty that immediate skin-to-skin contact post-birth confers measurable microbiome-mediated benefits?

mamajb

I am simply the messenger.
I am not nor have ever tried to be an authority on the microbiome.

Who?

Gotcha. Just the messenger. Up to people to Do Their Research. You’re just trying to help. Not taking any responsibility or putting any skin in the game. Just quoting lots of authorities. Nothing to see here.

So when you talk about Montgomery glands, is there such a thing, and if there is, could you identify one in a lineup? Could someone who does know about them identify one in a lineup?

mamajb

I am sending links because I am asked for sources. Sorry – won’t do that again. Find your own.
Who. Are you for real?? How old are you? Asking questions about weather glands of Montgomery are real. And identifying one in a line up????
Get a life.

Azuran

When we say source, that means studies, preferably published in respectable journals. Not wikipedia.
Even high school students know not to cite wikipedia.

mamajb

Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet. That doesn’t mean it’s infallible. And, it allows people like you to edit articles/information that you know to be false. I found the basic information on what the microbiome is to be fairly informative to the lay person.
I have never “cited” anything from wikipedia. I offered it’s explanation of the microbiome.

If you have opened the MANY source links I have offered in the past, you will find that they are from ACOG, NIHD, AWAONN, AAP, WHO, CDC, FDA etc. etc. These are organizations that most people recognize as accurate and trustworthy

Azuran

Sure, it’s good when you are having a drunken argument, or what to check out some random fact or just learn random stuff.
It is still not acceptable when someone asks for scientific evidence. The fact that you don’t even know that speaks volume of your scientific illiteracy.

mamajb

So SORRY! My bad! I’ll never do it again. Does that infraction to this scientific group nullify all the other sources I offered?

Who?

Oh dear. Petulant aren’t we.

I don’t know anything about glands of Montgomery, and very little about the weather.

I thought you must have known all abou them to write so eloquently on the topic, but that assumption was cast into doubt by your admission that all your smooth talk about microbiomes was so much hot air.

So I was checking up on you. Seems you don’t like that. And that’s okay.

As for who I am and how old, none of your business.

Amazed

Oh, I see. It’s a communication problem. Our definition of the word “sources” differ from yours.

When we say “sources”, we mean primary sources. Or at least sources linking to someone who did the research.

When you say “sources”, you mean everything that sounds good to you, chopped up to a state that can let you think you have some grasp. Unvariably, that boils down to unscientific blogs of people who are biased in the direction you like. Or professors who don’t even say what you think they do.

Glad to have this one cleared up!

Lilly de Lure

That’s not what you were saying upthread before roadstergal handed you your arse on a silver platter, you were very much acting as an authority on the microbiome. Claiming now to be “just the messenger” also implies an authority (in this case the authority of whoever it is you are the messenger for) – care to elaborate on how you know the “message” you are sending us about skin to skin is actually scientifically valid,given the doubts raised about your last piece of received wisdom?

momofone

Who do you mean by “we”?

Box of Salt

“Kangaroo Care” was specifically designated as such as a substitute replace incubators/baby warmers for premies in low resource areas.

But you like to grab on to any piece of evidence that’s shown to be beneficial for a subset of babies, and generalize it to everyone, regardless of specifics.

Let me repeat my question. I’d really appreciate an answer! None of the lactivists who have come here have given me a satisfactory one, and you could really stand out by doing so!

Here it is:
“Ah, the microbiome! How do you tell the difference between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ microbiome? What’s the evidence that breastfeeding leads specifically to an independently defined ‘good’ microbiome? Link studies, please.

Or, if it’s easier… I come from a formula-fed generation. In the ’70s in the US, less than 30% of babies got breast-fed. Breast-feeding rates have been on the rise in the US since then; as a parachuting lactivist noted a little while back, EBF to 6 months rates these days exceed the initiation rates in the ’70s.

What are the population-wide benefits we’re seeing from all of this breastfeeding? What chronic conditions does my generation suffer from that more recent generations are spared? What is the consequence of my deficient microbiome?”

mamajb

I am not an expert in this emerging field. I am neither a doctor, microbiologist or Immunotoxicologist so I will not be the one to answer your questions. – I sent you some links for you to research and read.

Here are some Q&A’s from some of the leading researchers in the field:

Dr. Amy, should be able to answer some of your more basic questions though. Especially if she is keeping up to date on this emerging science.

Roadstergal

So, in other words, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

I am a scientist and an immunologist, and I have worked extensively on the microbiome, and on the interaction of the microbiome with the immune system.

So, I can answer my questions for you. You’re welcome.

Our understanding of the microbiome is still in its infancy. There is no one ‘good’ microbiome – much like romantic partners, there are some definite ‘bad’ ones, but a multiplicity of ‘good’ ones. There are some microbiomes that are associated with disease, but they are either very stark (c diff, eg) or it’s unclear if they’re a cause or effect of disease. The fact that fecal transplants – which can be effective for persistent c diff infection – don’t work for IBD points to the complexity of the issue.

Healthy microbiomes are, currently, defined by the person. If you’re healthy, your microbiome is de facto healthy. A formula-fed child will have a microbiome more like their breastfed sibling living with them than they will with a breastfed baby elsewhere.

There are no health benefits anyone can point to that correlate with the rise in breastfeeding in the US since the ’70s. If there are any positive health benefits to breastfeeding (that is, that don’t tag along with breastfeeding as a result of the hefty correlation of breastfeeding with high SES, without causality), they are so swamped by every other factor that affects health as to be useless (as was found by the only breastfeeding studies that actually halfway tried to control for confounders, the PROBIT and discordant sibling studies).

The one effect that might indeed be correlated with the rise in breastfeeding is the rise of food allergies. Many interventional studies have pointed to the introduction of common food allergens between 4 and 6 months of age with a reduction in food allergy risk (the STAR, HEAP, EAT, BEAT, and LEAP studies, for starters). Therefore, the pressure to breastfeed exclusively for 6+ months is likely contributing to the current rash of food allergies.

Heidi_storage

Outstanding exposition of the microbiome-stuff for us laymen. Like “epigenetics,” I hear “microbiome” in connection with a lot of claims that don’t sound plausible but that come wrapped up with fancy language.

Roadstergal

Aw, thank you! I think it’s a good exercise for me to put it in plain language now and again… :/

I wasn’t going to exclude the possibility that she was somehow an expert in the microbiome and knew more than I did, so I tried to draw her out. And man, it pisses me off to come across someone who does a Science Words con game to push their ideology.

MaineJen

Bravo. 🙂

mamajb

Uh, then why did you ask? Did you really think that I would pretend to be something I am not?
That’s why I offered informations from others who are experts in the field. There are others.https://www.oneworldbirth.n…

That’s exactly what you were doing. You were claiming benefits to breastfeeding based on the microbiome, as if you understood it well.

You’re still claiming Argument From Authority. It’s invalid. Even if it were not – you’re not an authority.

mamajb

And, never said I was.

Who?

So when you say

‘And the Montgomery’s glands on the areola secrete a substance that
lubricate the nipple to keep it healthy. Montgomery glands also produce
antimicrobial factors that help prevent bad germs from growing. Pretty
cool huh?’

you’re just a regular Joe, shooting the breeze, right?

mamajb

I think our bodies and what they can do is pretty cool. But, that’s just me.

momofone

I think what they CAN do *if they work properly* is pretty cool too. I also know that there are many times and ways that they don’t do that. Just as I wouldn’t trust the engine in my car to never malfunction, I don’t assume it to be true of body parts either.

Who?

Pathetic, trite and formulaic.

Must do better.

Roadstergal

And you claim you know what they ‘can do.’ And you’re wrong. Will you now stop making those BS authoritative microbiome claims to your clients? Or will you keep making them, knowing they range from massively overstated to outright false, so you can keep making money?

The Bofa on the Sofa

Did you really think that I would pretend to be something I am not?

YOU were the one who claimed…

“The bacteria on the mothers skin is beneficial to the baby’s developing microbiome.”

What was that, if not pretending that you knew what you were talking about it?

Face it, she called your bluff and you revealed your hand and it was empty.

Just a reminder of Pablo’s First Law of Internet Discussion: Regardless of the topic, assume someone participating knows more about it than you do.

All that happens when you try to “educate” an immunologist about the microbiome is that you end up looking like a clueless dolt.

Amazed

She asked because she knew you’d reveal your ignorance and your pretended authority that you have no right to. Of course, you duly delivered. Any more questions?

Roadstergal

“The bacteria on the mothers skin is beneficial to the baby’s developing microbiome.”

Ah, the microbiome! How do you tell the difference between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ microbiome? What’s the evidence that breastfeeding leads specifically to an independently defined ‘good’ microbiome? Link studies, please.

Or, if it’s easier… I come from a formula-fed generation. In the ’70s in the US, less than 30% of babies got breast-fed. Breast-feeding rates have been on the rise in the US since then; as a parachuting lactivist noted a little while back, EBF to 6 months rates these days exceed the initiation rates in the ’70s.

What are the population-wide benefits we’re seeing from all of this breastfeeding? What chronic conditions does my generation suffer from that more recent generations are spared? What is the consequence of my deficient microbiome?

Charybdis

Nope, because there are other choices like liquid concentrate and RTF formula that don’t have that problem. Using those can eliminate that concern.
How about breastmilk contaminated with MRSA, salmonella or e coli? Or breastmilk that doesn’t have enough fat/calories?

mamajb

You are right. However, concentrate and RTF are more expensive and sometimes less convenient. Cost and convenience will be a huge influence for most families.
I hate to say this but…..the studies that have looked closely at the issue of the “quality” (fat/calories/nutrients) of breastmilk found little difference between well fed and malnourished mothers. Even severely malnourished mothers can produce great breast milk…for a few months, because the body takes nutrients from the mother’s own body to supply the baby. Studies conducted in industrialized countries such as the United States. In other words, infants of thin women generally consume as much breast milk as infants of normal-weight or overweight women. As these babies (of malnourished mothers) grow – (4-6 months of age) they will start the cycle of malnourished.
That said, it behooves mothers to stay well nourished pre-pregnancy, during pregnancy and after. WIC and other health agencies are in place for this purpose.

Who?

But staying (we’ll leave aside becoming) well nourished is more expensive than the alternative, and not always convenient.

And it’s ‘behoves’.

Roadstergal

It’s ‘behooves’ on this side of the pond. Because we love to mangle the Queen’s English.

Who?

Good to know.

I’m waging a one woman war against the ‘z’ instead of ‘s’, which my wretched work Word computer has as auto-fill, which I also hate.

‘Prioritize’, ‘agonize’, ‘galvanize’ aaagh.

Roadstergal

What was that Sherlock Holmes mystery where Holmes figures out that a businessman pretending to be local is actually American, because there are, like, thirteen words on his business card that are spelled differently in USlish? It was Encyclopedia-Brown level of unintentional comedy, hundreds of years before. :p

Heidi_storage

Oh, you can’t mock “The Three Garridebs”! Holmes actually shows concern for Watson in that one (and appears to be ready to commit murder on his behalf).

Roadstergal

That’s true, it was Slasher Heaven!

Ken S., As Seen On Watch Lists

Who ever said it was hers in the first place? Queens are for insects!

mamajb

Americans use “behoove” with a wider range of modifying words, such as would, might and certainly.
I won’t correct your use of words like colour, organise, humour. Please don’t correct mine.

Regarding well nourished; the vast majority of babies in the world are well nourished for free. Please note, I said the vast majority not ALL.
Regarding convenient; becoming a parent, I think most of you will agree, is or was inconvenient despite how our children were fed.

momofone

Not for free, even if they’re breastfed. Resources go into feeding mothers.

mamajb

Yes, mothers, fathers…..Everyone has to eat. Even those who do not breastfeed.

If you look at what is actually needed (a functioning brain, baby and breast) it is essentially free. You MUST have known what I meant – but still you argue back that resources go into feeding mothers. Come on!

That’s not to say that — regardless of how an infant is fed, parents buy a lot of “stuff”, necessary or not.

momofone

You keep moving goalposts when someone challenges you. Nothing is “free.” Energy is not created from nothing. That has nothing to do with what people buy for their babies and you either know that or should.

mamajb

I was using the word “free” colloquially not literally… Sorry I was not more clear for you.
Let me say more accurately – assuming that everyone has to eat; When compared to buying formula and the costs of processing (consumption of natural resources) and landfill space (landfill and incineration both contribute greatly to pollution), breastfeeding is essentially (not literally) free.

momofone

I’ve heard that argued before. Breastfeeding, even just the first year, cost me several times what formula would have cost. We have a regular here who lost about $500 a week breastfeeding due to breaks. If you breastfed and it was “free,” you are fortunate (and don’t consider your time very valuable, it would seem). It cost me a couple thousand dollars easily, not counting breaks from work, so your “free” argument does not hold water for me.

mamajb

In the US, the cost of feeding formula for one year will run between $816.48 $3,163.86 (calculations were based upon average daily formula intake. Low and high formula costs based upon an January 19, 2016 cost comparison of powdered, concentrate and ready to feed formulas, using the lowest formula prices from drugstore.com and walmart.com. Brands compared included the formulas manufactured by Ross, Nestle/Carnation, Mead Johnson, Baby’s Only Organic & PBM Products (Walgreen’s, Parent’s Choice, Bright Beginnings, etc.) http://kellymom.com/pregnancy/bf-prep/bfcostbenefits/

I breastfed three children on a very limited budget. No one suffered because of it. I can’t imagine spending “thousands” of dollars just to breastfeed. I don’t know anyone, personally or professionally, who has. I suppose if one had extra thousands to spend, one could find a way.

momofone

“I breastfed three children on a very limited budget. No one suffered because of it. I can’t imagine spending “thousands” of dollars just to breastfeed. I don’t know anyone, personally or professionally, who has. I suppose if one had extra thousands to spend, one could find a way.”

Well, obviously if YOU didn’t do it and don’t know anyone who has, it must not have happened. Clearly I was mistaken. Thank you for clearing that up for me.

mamajb

I didn’t say “it must not have happened”. I’m sure if you said you spent thousands of dollars to breastfed, you did. I believe you. What I did say is ” if one had extra thousands to spend, one could find a way”. That translates into – it can happen.

momofone

I didn’t, and don’t, have “extra thousands” to spend. I had so bought into the idea that breastfeeding was best that I spent a lot of money to do everything I could to make it possible. If I were going to do it again now, I wouldn’t breastfeed at all, for reasons that have nothing to do with desire, and I would feel quite happy feeding formula.

Just to itemize a bit, by the time I bought a pump, supplies, had supply issues and went to an IBCLC and a “breastfeeding doctor,” spent untold sums on fenugreek and oatmeal and whatever else was recommended to boost supply, in addition to traveling to and from those appointments (100+ miles away from home one way) and time away from work it was around $2000.

Amazed

How kind! In fact, I don’t even disagree. I just think you left out the next part of it which is, “if one doesn’t have anything valuable to do with her time, one could find a way to present it as something precious. That translates into – one can spend months with her boob in her three kids’ mouths.

You’re one passive-agressive asshole for sure. Someone quick, pass the water over! I am sure I have hurt our sweet little flower’s feelings almost as if I said, “fuck”!

KeeperOfTheBooks

Well, around here, meeting with a lactation consultant starts out at about $400/hour. No, that isn’t an extra zero. While we definitely don’t qualify for WIC and the associated programs there, we also aren’t in a position to drop thousands to talk to a lactation consultant. (I particularly appreciated their stated policy of charging you the $400 even if baby was sleepy and not in the mood to eat at the appointment time.)
You can talk to a LLL leader for free, though, who will helpfully tell you things like “are you sure you wanted your baby?” (me) or “I don’t care what the mammogram said, there’s no such thing as insufficient glandular tissue” (a neighborhood friend).

Who?

So somewhere between $2.24 and $8.67 per day, or about $15-$60 per week.

I’ve never counted a calorie in my life, so I don’t know what that means in terms of food quantity, but budget-wise it looks something like a couple of extra meals for one person. Maybe a hot lunch instead of a sandwich and a piece of fruit. Maybe a substantial snack a couple of times a day rather than nothing at snack time.

Pretty easy to absorb into an adult food basket, particularly with seasonal price changes, but very noticeable if you’re putting a tin in the trolley.

The Bofa on the Sofa

n the US, the cost of feeding formula for one year will run between $816.48 $3,163.86

One of the rules in the classic book, “How to Lie with Statistics” is to be leery of estimates that use ludicrous levels of precision.

Seriously? the cost of formula will run between $816.48 and something else? Not $816.47? Or $813.71?

Who are the clueless dolts who made these “estimates”?

mamajb

As I stated, Calculations were based upon average daily formula intake. Low and high formula costs based upon an January 19, 2016 cost comparison of powdered, concentrate and ready to feed formulas, using the lowest formula prices from drugstore.com and walmart.com. Brands compared included the formulas manufactured by Ross, Nestle/Carnation, Mead Johnson, Baby’s Only Organic & PBM Products (Walgreen’s, Parent’s Choice, Bright Beginnings, etc
These were exact amounts calculated not rounded up or down. That was last year though. The prices have gone up.

The Bofa on the Sofa

And as I stated, estimates that quote numbers to extremely silly precision are a sign of someone who doesn’t know what they are doing.

The Bofa on the Sofa

I have explained recently how exclusive breast feeding would have cost us probably $7500 for each of our kids in lost wages as opposed to combo feeding that we did.

My wife’s time is very valuable.

Roadstergal

The lactivists always ignore this. Because 1: they don’t want to state outright that they believe all moms _have_ to be SAH, they just want to hypothesize insane pumping schedules for working moms, and 2: they don’t want to admit that combo feeding is a thing that can be done successfully as a happy medium.

Heidi

You don’t think eating more consumes more natural resources? We don’t know what the mother is eating to even begin making an accurate assessment on which way is using more resources. Heck, she might be drinking Ensures or Ovaltine and essentially living off adult formula to meet her needs.

mamajb

Mothers should eat a healthy diet during pregnancy and lactation. Nothing special, just a balanced diet. Some do, some don’t. I’ve already provided the studies on breastmilk composition between well fed and not so well fed mothers.
Lactating mothers should have about 400-500 extra calories a day to maintain her pre-pregnant weight. That can be accomplished easily and cheaply. If she likes Ensure or adult formula, and can afford it fine. In the US, low income mothers have access to WIC that provides more food for breastfeeding moms.

Uh, no. I’ve had to use Ensure because of dental issues and that stuff is WAY more expensive than baby formula. A four pack, which isn’t enough calories for an adult in one day anyway, was $7 or $8 (which I wasn’t even making a claim about the price, I was countering your idea that breastfeeding would necessarily be better environmentally – it could be or it could very well not be. That is wholly going to depend on each individual woman and what she chooses to consume). I’ve done the math on one state’s WIC breastfeeding plan, and there was not enough extra food to make up for all the extra calories. I’m sure it varies by state, though. But this isn’t about WIC. Just the same, WIC has to provide formula if the mom can’t or doesn’t breastfeed so again, it’s not going to be cheaper for women on WIC to necessarily breastfeed and if they have to work, it’s going to cost them more because WIC doesn’t compensate their lost wages.

My point is you can’t make statements that one way or the other is cheaper for all women. It just doesn’t work like that. And while a woman is making 32 oz., 700 is not ridiculous. I look at a poster every time I take my child to the pediatrician that says to eat an extra 500-800 calories which was the same thing I was told at the hospital. Babies don’t start out consuming 32 oz. and they don’t generally end still eating 32 oz. You might only need 300 in the beginning, 700 in the middle and go back down to 300-400 calories when the baby begins weaning. I used 700 because it was an easy number to figure out how much money I spent per calorie to eat and how much money formula cost per calorie and the difference isn’t huge and it’s certainly not free either way, literally nor essentially as you say.

Who?

It seems that, to feed a baby, someone is going to need to spend a couple of dollars a day on more calories, for either the baby’s direct consumption, or its mother’s.

mamajb thinks that amount, when spent on food for mother, is actually nothing, and maybe to her, maybe to a lot of us, it is.

But in reality, it’s not nothing.

mamajb

The WIC program in CA more that compensates for the extra calories needed for breastfeeding. It’s sad that your state WIC does not.

And the 400-500 extra calories I quoted is from the Mayo Clinic. The range stated by different organizations is from 300-800.
I felt that the Mayo Clinic data would be recognized and respected on this site.
All this says is a few extra calories, in general, are needed for the calories burned to make milk. Some mothers will want to consume more in order to gain weight, some mothers will want to consume less in order to loose weight. There are more variables to this equasion as you well know. Calorie recommendations are simply a guide.
I think we are splitting hairs here though.

Heidi

They were a guide but then they weren’t when you made an absolute statement just a bit ago that only 400-500 calories were needed.

mamajb

I provided the Link to the mayo clinic site when I posted the original message. I was just quoting their recommendation. So, yes I made an absolute statement based on that Mayo Clinic’s recommendation. I hope that this group respects information from Mayo.

Nick Sanders

The WIC program in CA more that compensates for the extra calories needed for breastfeeding. It’s sad that your state WIC does not.

And here it is, the sniffing mock apology that belittles others for not being as fortunate as yourself. It worked alright for you, so surely no circumstances could preclude others from doing the same…

maidmarian555

It also particularly grinds my gears when they mock women at the other end of the scale who are so desperate to breastfeed because of the PROPAGANDA THEY ARE SPREADING that they end up spending thousands of dollars on consultants, medications etc etc, which often don’t actually work. If there’s one thing these people are at least consistent with, it’s never failing to look down their noses at everyone else who isn’t them.

myrewyn

Wow. Yes. So a woman who is struggling will be criticized for formula feeding, or mocked for using the “support” lactivists say will make breastfeeding possible for everyone.

maidmarian555

It is absolutely no wonder when you look hard at the language they use why so many mothers beat themselves up about how they feed their children. It’s just deeply, deeply unkind and unnecessary on so many levels. Babies are new for such a vanishingly short period of time, parents should be getting to enjoy that time without all of this bullshit getting in the way.

Juana

You’re still comparing apples to oranges – processed formula vs. whatever you think mothers are eating as a surplus because of their increased needs due to breastfeeding.
Hint: most mothers won’t get their 400-700 extra calories from completely unprocessed food. Instead they will be eating whatever they’re used to eat, just more of it.
Plus, here you’re shifting the discussion to the ecological footprint of formula vs. food – it was about breastfeeding being free of charge, as you claimed.

Heidi

I just did the math and it’s not that much different for me to formula feed. Based on our current grocery bill, it would cost $13 more a week to eat an additional 700 calories daily and our diet consists of a lot of beans and rice and is primarily vegetarian. No meats or expensive items and I live in the South where stuff is cheaper. Being that there’s average 20 calories per ounce, that’s the additional calories one would need for 32 oz. A 48 oz tub of formula at Sam’s Club is $23 and almost makes 320 oz. of formula. That’s about $16 a week. It’s not free. If I lived somewhere else in the US or ate more expensively I could see how BF would cost more. Sam’s Club formula, though will be the same price in CA or AL. This isn’t even taking into account lost wages to pump or women’s time not being free.

mamajb

Save your money Heidi, you only need 400-500 calories. There are very inexpensive and easy ways to get those extra calories.
If you are losing wages to pump during your breaks and lunch hour, your employee is not following federal laws.

If you feel that breastfeeding is/was not worth your time or money, that’s your choice. Do what works for you and your family.

Heidi

You don’t know how many calories I need or any other individual woman! 400-500 calories extra isn’t free! And if I personally chose to breastfeed exclusively, I’d have also been buying a baby coffin and a baby burial plot. I guess not having to raise him into adulthood would have been cheaper ultimately.

You don’t know all about federal laws either. Medical fields do not have to grant a 30 minute break if they can’t provide you one and as someone who has worked on a med surg floor that’s understaffed and an understaffed ER, they can never provide you one. My other job was a document coder at a huge law firm, and their 30 minute break was all my combined bathroom and coffee breaks. It was most likely legal as I don’t see a huge international law firm not knowing employment law. And no one has to provide you an hour for lunch. 30 minutes and again I would know because that’s how long my lunch breaks have ever been!

Heidi

This isn’t about whether breastfeeding was worth *my* time or money. You have made the statement that it’s free and I’m doing some simple math for you to show you it’s not free and it’s not necessarily the cheaper choice. It might be or it might not be – it all depends.

Um, right from the DOL site: Employers are not required under the FLSA to compensate nursing mothers for breaks taken for the purpose of expressing milk.

mamajb

Section 7 of the FLSA requires employers to provide reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for one year after the child’s birth each time such employee has need to express the milk. Employers are also required to provide a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from coworkers and the public, which may be used by an employee to express breast milk. The break time requirement became effective when the Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010.https://www.dol.gov/whd/nursingmothers/

Are we talking about the same DOL/FLSA???

Heidi

Am I going to have to screenshot this shit for you? Okay, I will. But providing a place and allowing them to pump is NOT saying they will pay you while you pump.

mamajb

Pay you extra you mean. Your breaks and lunch are already included in your paycheck.
They can’t pay you less because you pump.

momofone

Actually, they can. For someone who said earlier you didn’t consider yourself an expert, you sure do throw out definitive statements with great frequency.

Edited to add that, like Heidi, I’ve also never been paid for lunch.

Heidi

I’ve never been paid for lunch! LOL!!!

You don’t have to actually be given a break in the medical field. It has special exemptions. You don’t have to have a break if you only work 3 hours either. So maybe some women are working back to back part time jobs and getting no real break.

BeatriceC

Don’t get a break teaching either.

I left teaching for a corporate job. A couple months after I started, my boss asked me and a couple of other people who’d started around the same time I did what our favorite part about our jobs was. I said without hesitation “the ability to go pee any time I needed to”.

Yeah, forget having time to pump. I was blessed with an oversupply so I could pump right before the kids got to school and right after dismissal and still have an extraordinary amount of milk. That’s not the normal experience though.

Amazed

After her lovely spontaneous, totes natural sans a mass of interventions to stop postpartum bleeding from finishing killing her birth, my mom had a conversation with her OB along the following lines, “One day, you’ll sneeze and pee,” “One day? Like yesterday? And the day before?”

I really can’t see my mom ever managing in a school with younger students that cannot be left alone for a moment. After said birth au naturel, when she needs to go, she needs to go fast. She could make it till the end of class – usually – but longer? Forget about it.

If she had classes with younger students, it would have been a toss up between abandoning them and wetting and soiling herself in class uncontrollably. Thanks a lot, natural birth! I won’t be surprised if there were women who were actually forced to quit work in the aftermath of such a birth. But you know, natural birth almost never goes wrong and it’s followed by successful breastfeeding and pumping and if not, it’s your fault for not pressing your boss into giving you paid breaks anyway!

BeatriceC

I used to have to wear incontinence pads when I taught because of the lack of bathroom breaks. I taught 7th graders, but they can’t really be left alone either, at least not the type of inner city students I taught. These were the type of kids to dissolve drugs in their water bottles so they could stay high throughout the day. If they did that under adult supervision, imagine what they would do without it. Anyway, by the end of the day I’d be dribbling, and sneezing was always a toss up if I’d stay dry or not, so I wore pads.

I’m back to needing them again even with ready access to a toilet. This just started a couple months ago. Yay natural childbirth.

Amazed

Two years ago, my mom was almost admitted to the hospital with her blood pressure skyhigh after barely preventing a 15 year old from taking an eye off a classmate. Older students. Inner city as well. When she was offered to stay three more years to get a higher pension (like, 30 dollars higher), she refused without thinking twice and is quite happy with her choice.

I wonder what women with childbirth injuries did around here at the time of our births. I’m pretty sure there were no incontinence pads. Hell, there were only cloth diapers as well. And no formula for us mere mortals either. At least mothers weren’t haunted by the One True Dilemma: should I breastfeed, or should I formula feed? Of course, there was a downside to this as well, namely that if you ended up on the bad side of Nature, your brand new baby would starve. Ah well…

Empress of the Iguana People

No 7th grade i’ve met can be left alone, & i taught in rural ones.

Amazed

When my mom was teaching some 6th and 7th graders at home (ours), they were quick to grasp that *I* (grade 3th or 4th) could help them with the sentences they were left to write as she had to do something in the kitchen. Unfortunately (for them) she was equally quick to grasp what was going on…

Bombshellrisa

I have worked with my self employed husband. For me to pump while I work with him, I have to either go into the bathroom of the dealership we are at or hop in a car. There is a dealership that has a private lounge area, but that is for customers and not vendors. Not to mention if something needs to be sanded or sprayed or has a heat lamp on it, I couldn’t just leave it to pump.

Heidi

I think the ability to pump at work isn’t feasible for most women. You’d have to work no more than an eight hour shift but work full-time, get a long lunch break, work in a state with decent labor laws, not work in a field that has exceptions to the usual rules plus have a supply that responds well to the pump and only pumping once every 4 hours or more and really you’d probably need the support of your coworkers. The latter sounds like only a bad person wouldn’t be supportive but when I think back when I worked at the hospital with bare bones or less staffing, I think I’d begin to resent someone who wasn’t around when patients and I desperately needed them.

Bombshellrisa

Yes! All of this. It’s not safe to leave another nurse with all your patients while she is still responsible for hers too.

Heidi

You are from CA. Those liberal labor laws don’t exist here in TN. We don’t get paid for lunch and most places give a 30 minute unpaid lunch break IF you work at least 6 hours (I think. I can’t remember how many hours for sure that one has to work to be entitled to a break). We also don’t have any decent nurse to patient ratio laws so you work in a hospital here and you might have 10 patients or MORE. Ain’t no one sneaking out for 30 minutes for their “paid break.” It was a joke but it was totally legally.

Nick Sanders

It’s 6. Plus the unpaid break does not count towards your “hours worked” so being somewhere from 9 to 5 and taking that unpaid break is considered working a 7.5 hour day, both for pay and whether you are considered a full time or part time employee.

I hate this state…

mamajb

That was a federal Labor law and website. Not California. I think it is a tragedy that women have to choose between there their babies and their work. The only solution is to contact your representatives and let them know how you feel about making that painful choice that other women in industrialized countries do not have to make. It’s not right. We should do better for our families in America.

Heidi

The *Federal* Department of Labor does not require compensated lunches. All the DOL said was mothers had to be given an unpaid break to pump and a place to do it.

I could contact my representatives. I fax them ever so often. They have a habit of not answering their phones, but I assure you the good old boys the people around me put in could care less. They might even put my personal information on Twitter (seriously that happened in Mississippi or Alabama).

maidmarian555

It’s also a pretty moot point to declare that ‘this is the law so your employer absolutely should find a way to make this work regardless’. Life doesn’t work like that. We get paid mat leave here- this doesn’t mean that it’s always possible for every mother to take it all. For example, I was made redundant whilst pregnant. We were able to take that hit financially and made the decision that I would stay at home with wee man for the foreseeable. Had it been financially necessary for me to go back to earning my previous FT salary, the statutory amount I could claim (based on maximum National Insurance contributions) for my leave worked out less for an entire week than I used to earn in a day so I’d have needed to be back in the office pretty quickly. In addition, I worked in the public sector. Public sector employers are usually pretty good at ensuring new mums can get pumping breaks etc however, you still need to get your work done. I could not have done my previous Project Manager role with regular breaks at specific times. Maybe on a quiet day but I did a lot of travelling round to meetings, had to be at my desk for calls and emails, be ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice and deal with unexpected problems. I was too busy most days to take my unpaid lunch break away from my desk, there’s no way I could have fitted pumping breaks in every day- even with the full support of my employer.

Heidi

I live in a state that an employer can fire you for any or no reason at all with a few exceptions like race, religion or gender (which is to say they just can’t say that’s why they fired you even if it was their actual reason). So while on the​​ books, you cannot be fired for taking unpaid pumping breaks, they could just say you weren’t a good fit or whatever excuse they wanted to use.

Azuran

That suck. Here after 2 years you need a good reason to fire someone. We had a receptionist that was stealing medications and food for her animals. She had been working at the clinic for 10 years. The owners spent 6 months investigating her to get irrefutable proofs to make sure she couldn’t file a wrongful termination suit against them.

Heidi

Some employers do jump through a lot of hoops before firing people but we’re an at will employment state. Supposedly that means an employee can quit at anytime​ but there’s some loopholes for them evidently because one job said I would have to reimburse them for classes they taught that didn’t mean anything outside of that employer and another one said without a 2 week notice, I’d have to reimburse them for their employee manual and drug test!

Nick Sanders

An unequal power balance between employer and employee? That’s commie talk!

maidmarian555

Oh that happens here. I’ve not heard of it specifically related to pumping but there are an alarming number of women who are either made redundant during pregnancy or find things are made totally unbearable when they return to work. They raised the cost of tribunals, slashed legal aid to the bone and have made things pretty difficult if you don’t have plenty of money and you want to defend your rights as an employee. Whilst on the surface we have better protections here, if you’re not wealthy and your employers wants to get rid of you it’s not that hard for them to do. Women in already precarious positions with their employment aren’t going to be able to risk their jobs for the sake of pumping, no matter what the law says.

Nick Sanders

I’ve contacted my representatives before, usually as part of a petition involving not inconsiderable amounts of signatures. The few times I have gotten any response at all, it’s been form letters that boiled down to “lolnope”.

Heidi

My mom ended up having a representative meddle in my parents’ personal business just because she dared not support him. I might be a bit too paranoid but I won’t use my real name or give away my contact information to them.

So, here’s the thing, Mama JB, about work and moms, now that folk have given you a dose of reality below.

At my work, women (and men) have generous maternity (and paternity) leave. We really work hard to structure work around family, including cross-training multiple folk on assays and programs so that one person doesn’t _have_ to be there every time something goes down. We have locked mothers’ rooms that are accessible only to moms, with pumping supplies, outlets and lots of antibacterial soaps and lotions.

This means that women overall who want to breastfeed are way more successful at doing so than women in hourly jobs and the like who don’t have these advantages.

We also pay very well, so families have more money to live in healthier areas (away from freeways, eg, and in places where it’s safe and fun to walk/bicycle). They have money to have their kids take athletics, and eat lots of fruit and veg. The same flexibility that allows for pumping also allows for mom or dad to go home to take care of a kid who needs it, and to leave early on some days to take kids to advanced development and specialized athletics events. Plus, we have a very generous health care package, so kids get immediate attention to, and proactive treatment for, potential health issues, rather than when poor families have to wait until it’s an emergency and go to the ER.

Mama JB, I have one question for you, and please answer it. Do you know what a ‘confounder’ is?

Charybdis

Opposite of profounder (which is “more profound than thou)?

Charybdis

Fewer and fewer people are salaried these days, even in non-entry level jobs. I’m the Senior Technologist in a lab. Only upper management is salaried, supervisors, lead techs, etc are hourly. And no overtime, unless approved in advance. I also work in a biohazardous environment. We are allowed two 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute unpaid lunch break. None of that is conducive to pumping. And just because it is the law for companies to provide a suitable place to pump and allow employees time to pump, they aren’t required to pay them for the pump breaks.

Of course, that isn’t considering women in the trades or ones who are self employed.

Juana

Somehow I doubt this.
So you’re claiming there were several studies conducted in industrialized countries, which enrolled mothers and measured their breast milk quality, several of which were _severely malnourished_ while doing so for _months_ and nobody intervened to make sure that those mothers received adequate nutritional therapy?
Either the ethics boards of those studies didn’t hold any water, or severe malnourishment is not what you think it is.

Azuran

I wonder where they found a statistically significant number of severely malnourished post partum women.

myrewyn

And In industrialized countries such as the United States if I’m understanding correctly.

Azuran

And if we made formula illegal, I guarantee you that way more than 1000 babies a year are going to die.
Forumula savez much more lives that breastmilk ever could.

A recent Fed is Best (FIB) Foundation blog tells the tragic story of Landon, an infant who died at 19 days of age. Baby-Friendly USA extends its deepest sympathy to his family.
The lesson of this story is not that exclusive breastfeeding is dangerous as the FIB Foundation suggests. Most infants exclusively breastfeed successfully with no major health problems. Breastfeeding is safe and is the method of infant nutrition recommended by national and international health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The real lesson of this story is that there are certain conditions that require further assessment and close follow up with the mother, infant, or both. This kind of care is called for in the Baby-Friendly Guidelines https://www.babyfriendlyusa.org/get-started/the-guidelines-evaluation-criteria and Evaluation Criteria which clearly state that “additional individualized assistance should be provided to high risk and special needs mothers and infants and to mothers who have breastfeeding problems”1. The news reports about Landon point to some critical factors that put him at high risk, such as a complicated delivery with evidence of inadequate oxygenation at birth. The autopsy lists hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, which may have contributed to this child’s death.
High risk conditions do warrant increased monitoring along with the creation of specific infant feeding and care plans, which may or may not include supplementation with infant formula. The Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria do allow for supplementation for medical reasons and when mothers have made an informed, educated decision2.
The decision to supplement is a delicate one. Infant formula changes the infant’s gut. It can also negatively impact the establishment of the mother’s milk supply, thus effecting long term breastfeeding success. Practitioners must carefully weigh the risks and benefits of this decision.
While Baby-Friendly USA cannot comment on individual cases, we would like to point out how the Baby-Friendly Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria indicate ways to provide lactation support to mother infant pairs with feeding difficulties:
“Health care professionals should assess the mother’s breastfeeding techniques and, if needed, should demonstrate appropriate breastfeeding positioning and attachment with the mother and infant, optimally within 3 hours and no later than 6 hours after birth. Prior to discharge, breastfeeding mothers should be educated on basic breastfeeding practices, including:
1 http://www.babyfriendlyusa.org/get-started/the-guidelines-evaluation-criteria, Guideline 5.1 p. 16 accessed 3/13/17
2 http://www.babyfriendlyusa.org/get-started/the-guidelines-evaluation-criteria, Guideline 6.1 p. 18 accessed 3/13/17
1) the importance of exclusive breastfeeding,
2) how to maintain lactation for exclusive breastfeeding for about 6 months,
3) criteria to assess if the infant is getting enough breast milk,
4) how to express, handle, and store breast milk, including manual expression, and
5) how to sustain lactation if the mother is separated from her infant or will not be exclusively breastfeeding after discharge.”3
Mothers expressing discomfort with breastfeeding or who are exhibiting irritated, cracked or bleeding nipples especially require this assessment.
“Additional individualized assistance should be provided to high risk and special needs mothers and infants and to mothers who have breastfeeding problems or must be separated from their infants.”4
Mother’s with metabolic disorders and physiologic conditions that might alter their ability to produce an adequate supply of milk should have their milk production and milk transfer assessed periodically during the hospital stay and again, before discharge. Individualized plans of care should be implemented accordingly.
“The designated health care professional(s) should ensure that, prior to discharge, a responsible staff member explores with each mother and a family member or support person (when available) the plans for infant feeding after discharge…an early post-discharge follow-up appointment with their pediatrician, family practitioner, or other pediatric care provider should also be scheduled. The facility should establish in-house breastfeeding support services if no adequate source of support is available for referral (e.g. support group, lactation clinic, home health services, help line, etc.).”5
The care described in the news reports and blog regarding baby Landon are not consistent with the full implementation of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria. Baby-Friendly USA certifies hospitals based on a large set of criteria that must be maintained by the hospital itself. Being Baby-Friendly does not and cannot assure that every staff member will perform according to Baby-Friendly standards. However, in 2012, Baby-Friendly USA implemented a quality improvement program that requires hospitals to annually audit and report on their practices. Quality improvement plans are required for facilities whose audit results indicate their practices have fallen below the Baby-Friendly standards. Baby-Friendly USA continues to strengthen this program.
Links to some additional comments on the topic.
Hypernatremia Dehydration
Why Fed Will Never Be Best: The FIB Letting Our New Mothers Down
3 http://www.babyfriendlyusa.org/get-started/the-guidelines-evaluation-criteria, Guideline 5.2 p. 17 accessed 3/13/17
4 http://www.babyfriendlyusa.org/get-started/the-guidelines-evaluation-criteria, Guideline 5.1 p. 16 accessed 3/13/17
5 http://www.babyfriendlyusa.org/get-started/the-guidelines-evaluation-criteria, Guideline 10.1 p. 22 accessed 3/13/17
Resources for Families and Healthcare Professionals
Office on Women’s Health-Breastfeeding
Office on Women’s Health-Breastfeeding Fact Sheet
Office on Women’s Health-Your Guide to Breastfeeding
CDC-Breastfeeding
AAP Breastfeeding Residency Curriculum
AAP Breastfeeding Initiatives
AAP Sample Breastfeeding Assessment Questions
AAP Prepare for Breastfeeding Success
The Surgeon General’s Call to Support Breastfeeding and Breastfeeding Fact Sheet
ACOG Breastfeeding Toolkit
ACOG Breastfeeding Frequently Asked Questions
American College of Nurse Midwives – What to Expect in the Early Days of Breastfeeding American Academy of Family Physicians – Strategies for Breastfeeding Success
Supplementation Guidelines
AAP Policy Statement: Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk
ABM Clinical Protocol #3

sabelmouse

having read more [not that there is much to read] on various sites i find that there’s something fishy here.
but good job using this to rile against breastfeeding along with the worst tabloids.

Amazed

Bad job using this site, which has never banned you for all your lunacies so talking about bans just reveals how disgusting you are, rotten to the core, to rile for all the practices that make people suffer and die – breastfeeding at all costs, not vaccinating and so on. But as the case with most of the natural advocates is, you’re sorely lacking in both IQ and integrity. I am not surprised.

sabelmouse

it’s the other raptor then.
at least you know how to put down. i shall formula now.

Amazed

You were saying? You’re making even less sense than usual.

myrewyn

Huh???

Roadstergal

I had to resort to Sam Jackson, below.

She’s completely lost out on actual facts and reality, so she’s trying to play word games. But she’s startlingly bad at that.

Roadstergal

Yes, there’s something fishy here. We actually say that breastfeeding is imperfect sometimes and properly prepared formula isn’t poison. Women who never breastfed, women who cannot breastfed, women who combo-fed, and women who happily breastfed exclusively to toddlerhood all come together here amicably and discuss science and reality, rather than ideology. That’s unusual.

Nobody here tries to pretend that breastfeeding is perfect and formula will never be needed if you just do all the Right Things. Nobody here pretends that a bottle of formula post-partum will ruin breastfeeding, rather than potentially just give mom a much-needed rest and baby a little food while mom’s milk comes in.

People here don’t pretend that lactivism isn’t a thing, that there isn’t an industry out there with a lot to gain from demonizing formula and a lot to lose from women being more open to using whatever works best for them and their own individual circumstances, be it breast, bottle, or both.

I can understand how breast ideologues find this ‘fishy.’

sabelmouse

no, the story of the baby dying is. there’s more to it than had. i hope somebody investigates.

Roadstergal

And here we are, ladies, gentlemen, and others. Sabelmouse is trying to say that the mom is lying about the pressure to breastfeed exclusively leading her baby to starve. She’s suggesting that there should be an ‘investigation’ (as if the LC-documented risk factors to mom’s milk production, the child’s documented weight loss, the subsequent in-hospital diagnosis of dehydration and hypovolemic shock and MRI-confirmed subsequent brain damage, and the official autopsy don’t count).

If you don’t breastfeed exclusively, you’re a bad mom. If your baby dies because you tried to breastfeed exclusively, there’s something ‘fishy’ about the facts of your story.

It’s truly disgusting, what people like sablemouse – collectively, with all of the social pressure and pseudoscience and guilt they can bring to bear – do to vulnerable women desperate to do the right thing. And to their starving, sometimes brain-damaged, sometimes dead babies.

And this is why Dr T’s writing is so important. To let as many women as possible see the vile, ascientific ideology that drives sabelmouse and the rest of her ilk. To save the health and sometimes the life of babies, not sacrifice them on the alter of ‘natural’.

In 10 years, nobody will be able to tell if your baby was breastfed, combo-fed, or formula fed. Your kid will not know or care. The only way infant feeding really matters long-term is if the baby doesn’t get enough.

sabelmouse

not remotely what i said.
there’s more to this, is what i did say.

Roadstergal

“What you just posted is not what I said. What I did say was – that thing you just posted.”

Amazed

More lies from your breastfeed to death side? Do tell.

Mike Stevens

Sabelmouse isn’t very rational. When she encounters the most implausible and bizarre anecdotes of “harm” from vaccination, she swallows them up like they were the last glass of Koolade in the country, despite there being zero medical verification about the clinical background. Mere speculation that “vaccines did it” are sufficient.
Yet when there are verified deaths like this, she states the story is “fishy”. Go figure.

Charybdis

There was an autopsy. As well as an MRI and diagnoses of hypervolemic shock and subsequent brain damage. Complications from inadequate breastmilk intake, aka STARVATION caused Landon’s death. ALL the doctors, nurses and LC’s enthused that his latch was wonderful and his constant feeding from the breast was “cluster feeding”. His mother was not told that a couple of her health issues could/would affect breastmilk supply. Just constant cheers of “Rah, Rah, Rah, Breastfeeding!” and encouraging his mom to breastfeed more.
12 hours they were home before having to go back to the hospital. There was not an extended period of time before the damage was done. They were discharged from the hospital “exclusively breastfeeding” with no one checking to see if it was going well. Just “keep breastfeeding” and supplementation is not necessary.
The so-called and self-identified “experts” (LC’s etc.) did not look for nor did they advise the mother that breastfeeding *might* be a problem. They downright ignored those facts, in hopes that the mother would not be “discouraged” from/about breastfeeding. Not One. Single. Person. acknowledged that Landon’s mother might have issues and the “no formula, ever” refrain must continue to be preached.
Because breastfeeding cannot have a bad outcome, amirite?

mamajb

The news reports about Landon point to some critical factors that put him at high risk, such as a complicated delivery with evidence of inadequate oxygenation at birth. The autopsy lists hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, which may have contributed to this child’s death.

i figured that they are covering something up and conveniently for this lot here it can be used to persuade the unthinking to buy formula instead.

MaineJen

Wow, you really are the worst. Yes, this mother who has just lost her child is *so* focused on nefariously promoting formula feeding that she’s inaccurately reporting the circumstances of her child’s death. /sarc Do you even hear yourself?

Also, I would love to know where that information about the autopsy report came from, because it contradicts another quote from the autopsy report below.

There are worse things I could be saying. Like “This mother who just lost her child is clearly a dupe of the formula pushers. There is literally no other reason she would be out there sharing her story.”

What reason would the medical system have to lie about his death? Doctors don’t make money out of formula. Doctors don’t make money when babies die preventable deaths.

sabelmouse

covering their arses , dear.

Azuran

Covering what?
The autopsy report clearly puts the blame for Landon’s death on the failure of the medical system to recognize and properly treat his starvation.
Covering something bad you did by still pointing the finger towards you is bad cover up.

Heidi

Honestly, you’d be do better to quit thinking because all thinking has done for you is made you a deluded, dangerous, out of touch, self-absorbed, paranoid loon.

StephanieJR

Don’t forget victim blaming and shockingly low empathy.

yentavegan

You are trying to manipulate the facts surrounding the death of this newborn because you have been indoctrinated to believe that breastfeeding is a flawless biological system of nutrient transfer.

sabelmouse

how am i doing that by asking?
imagine you people would put in this effort every time a baby dies from a vaccine.
was this one given the hep b i wonder.

Azuran

Of course you bring it back to vaccine.

Azuran

My god you live in a paranoid world of conspiracies.

sabelmouse

so first i don’t care….

Azuran

Good for you I guess.

sabelmouse

you didn’t get the sentence.

Azuran

It was a poorly constructed sentence.

Who?

Not ‘they’ again!

‘They’ are the worst, right?

Roadstergal

I think that this is what ‘they’ use as an anthem. I mean, not the ‘they’ that ‘they’ are referring to, but the ‘they’ that likes to refer to an amorphous ‘they.’ You know, them.

Why, then, didn’i your deeply educated colleagues
take those critical factors into account as they chanted, “You’re doing great, mama, you’re doing great, he isn’t hungry?” So your colleagues can gleefully ignore the needs of a HIGH-RISK baby, and you come here all in arms about how overabundance of breastfeeding care and insufficient newborn care DIDN’T kill Landon?

Please.

Azuran

He had hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathie because he had a freaking cardiac arrest.
You want us to believe that Landon suffered extensive brain damage at birth, that no one noticed, and that he was neurologically normal at the hospital.
’emergency c-section due to fetal intolerance to labour’ doesn’t mean he suffered brain damage. (those are what the natural childbirth advocate call unneccesarian)

sure, wanting to find out what really went wrong means not caring about children. just like with vaccine injury.
i think it’s those using this for their own /corporate purposes who don’t care.

Nick Sanders

Look, you clearly prefer shadowy conspiracies to verifiable facts, and every death is just a chance to push your “be afraid” bullshit that leads to more deaths, so do us all a favor and fuck right the hell off.

mamajb

You know Nick, I hope you can learn to make a point and even argue in a more mature, respectful way.
Try it.

Roadstergal

Funny how you think a naughty word is immature and disrespectful, but implying that a woman is lying about the death of her child as part of a massive conspiracy to cover up the secret that breasts are the only human body part that always work perfectly, isn’t.

And I don’t mean ‘funny’ like ‘haha,’ I mean ‘funny’ like ‘have you ever taken the Hare PCL-R?’

Heidi

She is quite the awful person.

mamajb

What??? The Hare PCL-R scores are used to predict risk for criminal re-offense and probability of rehabilitation. What does that have to do with what is being discussed here???
Don’t bother to answer. I won’t be going there with you.
I was just saying that there are ways to communicate in a more mature, respectful way and suggested that Nick give it a try. I think that even Dr. Amy would agree.

Nick Sanders

And I’m saying that when someone publicly defends child abuse as a “vaccine injury”, they can kiss my ass.

Nick Sanders

I did. I’ve spent years arguing respectfully with sablemouse. And it turns out that she is intellectually dishonest, intractable, and a fucking liar to boot. So to hell with it. I’m tired of being nice to a person doing her damnedest to makes sure more kids die of preventable causes without even having the guts to be honest about it. She doesn’t deserve respect.

Azuran

Don’t mind it, Sabelmouse is a well known asshole that has been trolling for years now. She lost the privilege to be taken seriously and respected a very long time ago.

Nick Sanders

So, still think I should be more respectful to sabel?

sabelmouse

oh, i though your pushing the ”be afraid of shit” thing.
be afraid of breastfeeding, and all the deadly diereses need vaccines for.
did this child get the hep b btw?

Nick Sanders

I’m not saying be afraid of breastfeeding, and you damn well know it. I’m pointing out that it’s a double standard to expect formula powder to be sterile when breastmilk isn’t.

And I have no idea if the baby got the Hep B vaccine or not. But it’s completely irrelevant because it doesn’t cause fatal dehydration.

sabelmouse

sterile???????
who’s talking about that though there’s a slight difference between something made in a factory and supposed to keep a while and something made fresh in one’s body.
since the likes of you believe/claim the the hep b vaccine is harmless how would you even know?

And I know because I don’t “believe” it’s safe, I know it is based on testing. Further, the Hep B vaccine is ridiculously common, while babies dying of dehydration isn’t.

sabelmouse

babies being damaged by, or dying from hep b happens.

Who?

Which is exactly why the hep b vax is so very important.

sabelmouse

the vaccine. only babies of heb b positive mothers are remotely in danger from the actual disease.

Who?

All babies are at risk of hep b, which can live on surfaces for a long time. The vax provides great protection.

sabelmouse

ever thought of trying stand up?

Mishimoo

It took two weeks of breaking through heavy sedation for my husband’s step-mum to die after finally going into hospice care thanks to liver failure traced back to a childhood Hep B infection. It caused permanent damage which eventually culminated in non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver and a horrific death. Vaccines prevent this and other awful deaths.

sabelmouse

wow, that’s even worse than people dying of measles decades after having had them!
is’t it lucky that in some places pregnant women get scanned for this?

Mishimoo

Every time I get just a smidgeon of faith in humanity, someone like you comes along and destroys it with your deliberate obtuseness and cruelty. Congratulations, you are a spectacularly terrible person and I feel sorry for everyone you come into contact with.

sabelmouse

says someone who probs don’t give a rodent’s caboose about children, or even old people being damaged, and killed by vaccines.
but 1 anecdote of an older person dying from an old hep b infection is supposed to be a reason to endanger every infant.
YOU win in the terrible person department.

Mishimoo

If you cared about them, you wouldn’t be using them to score points in your disgusting game.

sabelmouse

i’m not the one playing games.

Mishimoo

You just keep on telling yourself that.

sabelmouse

right back at ya!

Azuran

The difference is that over 99.99% of vaccine injured children exist only in your head.

Jonathan Graham

So wait you’re declaring someone a terrible person based on what they PROBABLY are?

While every person who gets harmed via vaccination is tragic. The statistically strong evidence say this almost never happens and that disease itself (like in Mishimoo’s example) is much, much, much worse.

655321

Still pimping for Pharma Jonny? “The statistically strong evidence say this almost never happens” ….sure thing, except we don’t the data to make that statement, but it somehow doesn’t stop you from making it. Good stuff.

Jonathan Graham

Still pimping for Pharma Jonny?

Never have been. I see that your math still is around the elementary school level.

655321

Lol, I see your logic is still in the womb.

Renè

He pimps for a gay Frenchman.

Jonathan Graham

Awwww you’re all cranky. Maybe you need a nap.

(homophobic post reported)

Mike Stevens

There are several particularly heartless antivaccine posters on disqus. Sabel is one of the more unhinged.

Mike Stevens

You are a callous b****, aren’t you, Sabel.
Mishimoo’s story was of a childhood Hepatitis B infection, not one transmitted during delivery (and potentially preventable by vaccination following antenatal screening).

Jonathan Graham

This person is talking about a childhood HepB infection not necessarily a maternally contracted infection. So you could “scan” (the word is ‘tested” by the way) all you want and you wouldn’t prevent this.

Mike Stevens

Sabel is a disease denialist.

The evidence indicates that prior to introduction of universal infant immunisation against Hepatitis B in the US, there were as many as 12,000 transmissions in infants and children each year, with only around half of these being direct transmissions from an HBsAg positive birth mother (potentially detectable through screening). That means there were thousands of cases through other modes of transmission (other blood/bodily fluid contact with Hep B carriers in the family/friends or playmates/daycare exposures etc). Sabel refuses to acknowledge that these cases ever existed.

Since Hep B vaccination, the numbers of these cases has dropped to next to nothing.

Azuran

and those with fathers or siblings, cousins, or friends babies that are infected. And the kids who will go to kindergarden or school with infected children.
And seeing as kids<1 have around 90% chance of having chronic infection, and those <6 have 50%. It's very important to give vaccines to babies. It works: the worldwide prevalence in kids <5 dropped from 4.7 to 1.3%. And its safe.

Nick Sanders

If that were true, then why has universal hep b vaccination drastically decreased the rate of new hep b infections, particularly in children?

anybody convinced by THAT agrees with you anyway [ co workers] or has some cognitive issues.

Nick Sanders

Yeah, CDC data is such a lame argument…

Heidi_storage

Good! You should be.

Mike Stevens

Yes it has.“During 1990–2002, a total of 13,829 cases of acute hepatitis B were reported in the United States among persons aged <19 years. The incidence of reported cases declined steadily during this period, from 3.03 per 100,000 population in 1990 to 0.34 in 2002, representing a decline of 89%"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5343a4.htm

But I know you are unreceptive to facts that contradict your own antivax dogma, Sabel.

Wrong.
Hepatitis B can survive outside the body for up to 7 days, during which time it can cause infection. Hepatitis B is present in saliva and blood.

Yes, you can get if from sex and sharing needles, but also from sharing toothbrushes or eating utensils, and there are documented cases of infants contracting Hepatitis B from eating food which had been masticated by an infected person.

It’s why Hepatitis B is described as endemic in much of the world. If it was only mother to child or sexually transmitted all those people in Asia and Africa wouldn’t be contracting it throughout their childhoods.

Yes. We do.
Your corner of it may have clean running water, electricity, sanitation and access to lifesaving medical treatment and preventative medicine, not everyone is so lucky.

sabelmouse

right, so let’s have vaccines instead of those.

Heidi_storage

The nasty remarks just keep coming, don’t they? Do you think for one second that Dr. Kitty is advocating for vaccines instead of clean water, etc.? (Hint: Dr. Kitty is not a sadist who likes to see people suffer and die from preventable causes.)

Empress of the Iguana People

Lets have all of it. Dr. Kitty is not advocating one over the other.

Roadstergal

I’m pretty crazy – I think it would be an ideal world if all people had access to vaccines AND clean water AND safe food AND safe shelter AND other preventive medical care…

Vaccines are relatively small and easy to transport, and one injection confers a lot of downstream protection, so it’s an easy one to tackle. Consistent clean water is a harder one, so it’s taking longer, but to think that it’s one or the other is just short-sighted. Nobody giving vaccines isn’t also a strong supporter of all of the other benefits these people are lacking.

The Gates foundation even has contests to engineer better condoms that will be more reliably used. You can tackle all kinds of things at once!

Roadstergal

“Hepatitis B can survive outside the body for up to 7 days”
The CDC and WHO say ‘at least 7 days’ based on an old 1981 Lancet study, where they found HepB was still good to go after drying and storing for a week (they didn’t test longer). Our training says ‘weeks to months’ – I’m digging up those references. It’s a scary virus. 😮

“there are documented cases of infants contracting Hepatitis B from eating food which had been masticated by an infected person”.

Note to self…do not allow children to chew other people’s chewed up food.

It’s hard to take you seriously. When making a decision about whether to vaccine one’s own baby here in the US, does it really matter how endemic the disease is in the developing world?

This is what you folks need to realize. The Hepatitis B vaccine at birth was a Bridge Too Far, it was the straw that will eventually break the camel’s back and is one of the main reasons that new parents begin to question what they are told about vaccines.

And it only makes things worse when pro-vaccine zealots try to justify this insane policy with statements like yours.

Recently I tried out a new doctor, she suggested I get a flu shot. I said no thank you, she wanted to know why. So I launched into a 10 minute talk about how ineffective the vaccine can be, and that it contains aluminum adjuvant which recent research is finding to be very concerning. She then hit me with the talking point about the amount of ingested aluminum we typically get.

Then I asked her if, as a physician, she was familiar with the difference between ingestion and injection, and if she was aware that ingested aluminum is in a very different form than the aluminum salts used in vaccines. This offended her…clearly a defensive reaction. Time to find a different doctor.

kilda

and I’m sure that just broke her heart. /s

Nick Sanders

If it’s insane and it works, it’s not insane.

And it works.

Has the number of people in the United States with acute Hepatitis B been decreasing?

Yes, rates of acute Hepatitis B in the United States have declined by approximately 82% since 1991. At that time, routine Hepatitis B vaccination of children was implemented and has dramatically decreased the rates of the disease in the United States, particularly among children.

WHO has a viral hepatitis ERADICATION plan.
Hepatitis B is like Smallpox, not ‘flu.
There is a vaccine that works against it.
It doesn’t mutate and develop resistance.
We have good tests for infection, infectivity and immunity.
If enough of the world is immunised against Hepatits B, we can get rid of it entirely.

The same way we could eradicate polio, measles and rubella.

If background incidence of Hep B is high enough, and immigration from Hep B endemic countries is high, vaccinating infants routinely makes sense. That is the case for the USA, and the CDC ran the numbers before recommending adding it to the routine schedule.

What is your evidence that the CDC’s statistical cost/ benefit analysis of introducing routine infant Hepatitis B vaccination was flawed?

If your argument is that increasing vaccination rates in Hep B endemic countries are what reduced Hep B rates in the USA, then your argument basically boils down to “I am happy for poor people of colour living in developing nations to have vaccinations, but I am unwilling to take them myself”… and there is a word for people who place lesser value on the lives of POC.

Interesting. You left out “safety”. Always an afterthought eh? The simple fact is that the HepB shot accounts for an inordinate number of submissions to VAERS, and before you start pooh-poohing VAERS, let me remind readers that here is how the percentages break out as to who reports vaccine adverse reactions to VAERS:

There is strong evidence indicating that the HepB shot is causing auto-immune reactions in infants, sometimes leading to permanent disability and death. This is confirmed by cases adjudicated in NVICP.

And before you start claiming that the CDC “ran the numbers” when they decided to vaccinate infants against Hepatitis B, readers might be interested to know that in fact, the justification which came from the CDC was quite literally “Babies are accessible”. That’s it. It was just too damn hard to reach the high risk groups, so they targeted infants. At birth. For a disease which is transmitted almost exclusively through sexual contact or sharing needles.

Earth to Kitty…smallpox vaccine did not eradicate smallpox. There is abundant evidence, especially from the UK and from the New England states, which shows that the smallpox outbreaks almost with exception immediately followed mass innoculation campaigns. Also, the incidence of smallpox fell in areas which implemented policies of quarantine ony, whereas those areas which implemented vaccination campaigns suffered outbreaks. Learn your history.

Also…um…hate to break it to you but polio and measles are not eradicated. Measles is on a comeback and indications are that the use of the vaccine is part of the problem. All of these diseases had declined precipetously before the respective vaccines had even been introduced.

More on measles:

The Re-Emergence of Measles in Developed Countries: Time to Develop the Next-Generation Measles Vaccines?
Journal Vaccine, 2012. Poland.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905323/
“Thus, measles outbreaks also occur even among highly vaccinated populations because of primary and secondary vaccine failure, which results in gradually larger pools of susceptible persons and outbreaks once measles is introduced [8]. This leads to a paradoxical situation whereby measles in highly immunized societies occurs primarily among those previously immunized [8].”

The future of measles in highly immunized populations. A modeling approach.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6741921
“long-range projections demonstrate that the proportion of susceptibles in the year 2050 may be greater than in the prevaccine era.”

Analysis of measles-related hospitalizations in Tuscany from 2000 to 2014.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27240964
“Data stratified by age group showed that the hospitalization rate significantly increased in young adults over the study period, confirming an increase in susceptibility to measles in this subpopulation.”

Lastly, why do you cast aspersions on someone who simply suggests that we use vaccines in places where they are needed? We don’t vaccinate against Hepatitis A everywhere…why is that?

Dr Kitty

I honestly don’t want to argue with someone stupid enough to believe that Smallpox wasn’t eradicated by vaccination.

What that tells me is that you can’t assimilate information rationally.

Certainly, your citations, when read by someone who isn’t an anti vaccine loon, aren’t making the arguments you claim they are.

Name calling and ad hominem attacks instead of addressing actual content. Check. All the signs of a pseudo-skeptic.

If you would bother to actually look into the facts of the smallpox outbreaks and what actually worked, you will see that everything I said is true. Use of the smallpox vaccine increased incidence of smallpox, there are examples of this from many countries.

As for my citations, why don’t you tell me why they aren’t saying what I am claiming they are saying? I already know the answer…because that would require that you actually understand them.

sabelmouse

🙂

Mike Stevens

“Use of the smallpox vaccine increased incidence of smallpox, there are examples of this from many countries.”

This is a not uncommonly retold factoid, David. It arose I assume because following vaccination introduction, people were very meticulous at monitoring for and reporting any skin problem as possible smallpox, hence apparent increases in some vaccination campaign areas. And then there are the usual uncorroborated reports and lies spread about by antivaxers, purporting to indicate “evidence” for your claim.

The overall outcome of the smallpox eradication campaign was to eradicate smallpox however, in case you have forgotten. Or maybe you think it just continued to increase everywhere they used smallpox vaccine, and therefore the entire world developed smallpox back in the 1960s?

Of course, the vaccine wasn’t perfect, and it did (occasionally) cause someone to develop smallpox. However, this chance was much less than the chance of developing and dying from smallpox without the vaccine, so people went and got it anyways. People (not you, but sabelmouse and David Foster) always forget that there is a risk-benefit analysis to be performed- vaccines aren’t perfect, they’re just waaaay better than the alternative.

Mike Stevens

That is very true. Those against vaccination like to point out that smallpox vaccination back in the 1700s was rather hit and miss. There was essentially no coordination, no public health strategy, and no epidemiological concept of what should be done, so of course “vaccination” was sometimes seen as a failure.
In their mind, any ongoing smallpox cases, or any problem with the vaccine was equated with a “totally useless vaccine”,
ie the Nirvana fallacy at its most disingenuous.

Antivaxers like to live in the past however, and they still think that this is the current situation (or should I say was the more recent situation during the WHO global smallpox eradication programme in the latter half of last century).
However, the outcome was unequivocally positive – smallpox was eradicated, thanks to the dedication of the combined and coordinated efforts of the teams on the ground.

Did you read the study? Let me guess, you saw “1984” and immediately dismissed it, right? How typical.

Why don’t you go back and read the study…it makes predictions through the year 2050 so it is quite relevant, and given the recent increase in measles outbreaks would also seem to have some predictive value.

Mike Stevens

David, your cited paper is from 1984, and made predictions about measles out to 2050 unless there was a change in “present vaccine technology and public health policy”.
1. There has been a change, in both the vaccine and the public health strategy.
2. The predictions made do not look likely to happen.
Your opinion may have been based on what were the supposed (well predicted, really) “facts” about measles in 1984, but since then those “facts” have changed. Shame you cannot alter your opinion in tandem with that.

FallsAngel

Re: Dr. Poland (who you’d never quote otherwise as he is very pro-vax):
This quote of Poland’s is a great example of what Merits likes to say, (paraphrasing) that claims stand on their own merits, not who is saying them. WRT measles, Poland is simply wrong. Measles is still overwhelmingly a disease of the unvaccinated. 88% of the current measles cases in Italy, and 96% in Romania are among the unvaccianted. In the Disney outbreak, 78% of patients for whom records were available were unvaccinated. In the Ohio Amish outbreak virtually all of them were unvaccinated.

The US and indeed the entire western hemisphere has been declared measles-free, though Wakefraud is doing his darndest to change that. Likewise, with polio.

In the US, Hep A vaccination started out being used only in the western US where there was a major outbreak of the disease. At some point, it was decided to include it in the recommended immunizations for all kids. Basically, Hep A is ubiquitous.

Can you provide your source for your claim that 78% of the Disneyland cases were unvaccinated (of those having records)? If one looks at the 110 cases within California, of those having records 45% were unvaccinated, but that is slightly misleading statistic because 12 cases were infants too young to be vaccinated. The median age of cases was 22 years old. There was not a single documented case of transmission of measles within the school setting, yet this outbreak was used as justification for SB277 which denies access to public and private education unless students are fully vaccinted.

As for Wakefield, it is not surprising to hear you parroting such a typical talking point. Dr. Wakefield was and has always been in favor of vaccination against measles, he spoke at length about the seriousness of the disease. His 1998 Lancet study did not try to link MMR vaccine with autism, it was a small case series study looking at a novel bowel condition. The authors merely noted that most parents had mentioned that their child’s symptoms began shortly after their MMR vaccination. The study made it clear it did not demonstrate any link, but that future research was warranted. Dr. Wakefield continued to recommend measles vaccine, but he also recommended the use of individual vaccines. The UK then promptly made the individual vaccines unavailable and proceeded to dismantle his career. How ironic that they then blamed reduced vaccination rates on Wakefield, a convenient scapegoat since they had themselves taken away parents’ only option which was the individual vaccines.

Amy Tuteur, MD

There is no surer sign of scientific ignorance than contempt for expertise. Thanks for demonstrating this principle in practice!

Really just you and those like you who refuse to read what you cite (which inevitably says the opposite of what you say it says), refuse to learn anything about the human immune system, and refuse to interact with the reality that vaccines are one of the greatest life-saving advancements humanity has ever achieved.

sabelmouse

”refuse to learn anything about the human immune system”
PRICELESS, like mastercard.

Oh yes, I’m so fanatic *rolls eyes* How dare I argue that immunology is a science and that vaccines prevent diseases based on empirical evidence? How dare I support all women on how they want to feed and have their babies with actual evidence and knowledge and informed consent. Truly, I am the worst!

/s, in case people were at all wondering

sabelmouse

and do you support vaccine choice?

Empress of the Iguana People

Oh, we even support your right to choose to give birth in your bathtub an hour from the nearest hospital. That doesn’t mean we don’t think you’re a damned fool who may well be endangering someone else’s life.

sabelmouse

we? the hive mind?

Azuran

My god you have problems….

Empress of the Iguana People

We are the Empress.
Seriously, don’t be ridiculous. I was using the fact that the majority of the regulars do in fact support your right to be a blithering idiot about healthcare to use the pronoun “we”.

sabelmouse

it’s quite clear that you are cliquey.

Empress of the Iguana People

Well, considering those professionals who advocate vaccination vastly outnumber those who don’t, it’s not so much a clique as going with societal norms. Across the planet’s many societies.

sabelmouse

cowards or prostitutes, that is the question.
no offence to actual prostitutes.
but the clique refers to the hive mind that you seem to be part of.
pretty sure which cat you lot fall into.

Who?

As opposed to the rugged individualism of the anti-vaxxer, I suppose?

sabelmouse

i don’t know about rugged. you don’t need that to think.

Empress of the Iguana People

I think you’re wrong about vaccines, as do all of the other regulars here. That’s not cliquey, no matter your personal definition. We also all believe in climate change and giving birth as safely as possible. You know, going with scientific consensus. There are other areas where we disagree, sometimes quite vigorously.

I do not do scientific research, because I’m a historian. Anti-vaxxers like yourself have been around since about 3 minutes after the first was invented. Could vaccines be improved even more? Sure. I am deaf from a common childhood illness that most kids survive without any lingering effects. My husband is blind because his mother caught German Measles while she was pregnant with him. Rubella is almost always very mild for people who are born, but it wrecks havok on 1st trimester embryos/fetuses. MIL is a childhood cancer survivor, so her immunity was wiped out. No one in our family is on the autism spectrum, no one in our family has had a reaction worse than a sore arm for a few days or a fever for a few hours. “Our” refers to both my family and my husband’s family.

sabelmouse

ok.

Who?

What do you mean? Here you are, expounding nonsense on the internet, you don’t need support.

Choose what you want, just don’t lie to other people about the so-called benefits.

And when people die because of your choices, own your part in it, don’t run away with your tail between your legs.

Seeing as how I don’t support medical neglect of children, no, of course not. That’s in part because a friend’s child, who could not be vaccinated for medical reasons (she was allergic to them- they tried one with medical supervision since it was a known possibility and it sent her to the hospital, so they didn’t do any others)- that child died at the age of 3 from extended complications from influenza, a vaccine-preventable disease. Vaccine choice is saying that 1) you think your special snowflake should be a free rider on the vaccinations of others and 2) you don’t care if other people’s children die of vaccine preventable diseases your child passed on, because you haven’t bothered to learn how it all works. I can’t support ignorance or threats to public health.

If a child has a valid medical reason to avoid vaccination, on the other hand, of course I support that! That’s one reason why everyone else needs to get their vaccines, to protect those few who can’t.

Facts needed, m’dear. Claims without facts or evidence may be dismissed without consideration. I do love how you’ve just dismissed the death of a toddler as nonsense, though. That really shows where you fall in all of this.

Empress of the Iguana People

When you believe the cranks and quacks, other people’s facts don’t matter.

sabelmouse

you’re proving my point that it would be a waste of my time as you can’t differentiate between someone calling your nonsense nonsense, and what happens to a given child.

I’m still waiting for evidence, studies, anything really, that backs up your claims. Still haven’t received it.

Your claim that vaccines aren’t necessary led to the death of a child. More than one, most likely, but only one that I can pin down for sure. And instead of acknowledging that, you’re trying to duck it. You haven’t expressed even one iota of remorse or empathy either. My “nonsense” would have led to people getting their flu vaccines, one vulnerable child most likely not getting the flu, and therefore not dying. Your nonsense supports the position of those who passed on the deadly disease. The only point that has been proven is that you have no evidence to support your claims.

sabelmouse

how do you know that child didn’t get the flu from a vaccinated?
and what help would a none working flushot even be?

rosewater1

Nothing is certain. Vaccines aren’t magic bullets or shields of invulnerability. But for a great number of people, THEY WORK. And they might very well have saved this child.
And yes, you are being offensive. A child is dead. You’re a mother yourself. Surely you can advocate for vaccine choice without calling the death of a child nonsense.

sabelmouse

sure, the flu shot is famous for working and would have saved this child.
i didn’t call a child’s death nonsense, i called a comment/er nonsense.
do you people have ANY comprehension?
then again, you think that the flu shot works.

Azuran

because we understand how science work, unlike you.
Sure, the flu vaccine is not 100% effective, and some years it fails.
BUT, considering how highly contagious flu is, and how many people die from it, a 30% protection is better than nothing and does save lives every years

We don’t, but since the vaccine helps prevent people from getting and transmitting the flu, a higher vaccination rate would help. When you promote anti-vax, you decrease the number of people who get vaccinated. It works the same way stochastic terrorism works- you put your rhetoric out there and then people follow it to the point of hurting or killing others. But you didn’t tell that person to do that thing, so obviously you’re innocent, right? Wrong.

Flu vaccines have varying levels of effectiveness, true, but even the ones that have the least effect still mitigate the effects of flu and make it less likely for someone to catch it.

I still note not a single iota of regret or empathy for a dead toddler. It seems like you don’t care. And, more importantly, you’re trying to shift the discussion away from your lack of evidence. I’m still waiting.

sabelmouse

the 20 % or less working flu shot?
if you had had any credibility before now…….

Empress of the Iguana People

Flu is not measles. It mutates rapidly and has a zillion strains. Some years they guess the predominant strains better than others, but even if you have the misfortune to get a variety that wasn’t covered this year, it’s usually milder than it otherwise would’ve been.

Most flu vaccines work a lot better than that. One year, when scientists miscalculated which strain it would be, the effectiveness was that low, and even then those who were vaccinated had milder flus if they caught it. So yeah, nice try, but no.

Azuran

Choices come with consequences.
Are you ready to accept the consequences that come with your choice of not vaccinating? Such as you and your child being refused a spot in some daycare, schools, summer camps etc.

Charybdis

Depends on what you call “choice”. Do you want it in your left arm or the right one? Salk or Sabin version of polio vaccine? (although I don’t think the Sabin one is widely used anymore in the US)? Flu shot this year, yes or no? That sort of thing, sure.
“Should I decline the MMR for my child?” “Should I refuse the Hep B shot for my baby?” Actively seek out the actual chicken pox instead of getting the vaccine? Refuse the DTaP? Those sort of things, Oh Hell No.
If you are allergic to an ingredient in the vaccine, if you are immunocompromised or have a prior bad vaccine reaction (soreness and redness at the injection site, along with a low grade fever and feeling crappy for a day or two don’t count in this category), you are medically exempted from vaccines (some or all). It is these people who rely on herd immunity to protect them from being exposed to VPD’s. And its precisely these folks who are being endangered by the “I don’t believe in vaccines/I have a religious objection to them” people.
Because if your health is bad enough or you are fragile enough (very young, very old), you have enough issues without being afraid that every cough or sneeze from another person or coming into contact with a surface is going to expose you to a VPD that could kill you.

sabelmouse

another pro who get’s info from/has the understanding level of a pro -paganda picture book for little children.

Azuran

Yet even ‘little children picture book’ level of knowledge is apparently too advanced for you.

Charybdis

What, pray tell, are you babbling about?

sabelmouse

i shall try to make a picture book for you/se.

swbarnes2

Do you support “firing a gun willy-nilly in public” choice? How about “Driving through red lights” choice?

The Bofa on the Sofa

The “drive with my child not in a carseat” choice?

sabelmouse

nothing to do with each other.
analogy don’t work.
so much straw it might burn.

I assume the expertise of the CDC since they issued the data on the Disney measles outbreak, and maybe also the expertise of the British Medical Journal regarding the Wakefield fraud?

FallsAngel

Yes, I can and I will when I get home.

FallsAngel

You know, I personally have posted this information at least a half dozen times if not more, as have several others.https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6406a5.htm
“Among the 110 California patients, 49 (45%) were unvaccinated; five (5%) had 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine, seven (6%) had 2 doses, one (1%) had 3 doses, 47 (43%) had unknown or undocumented vaccination status, and one (1%) had immunoglobulin G seropositivity documented, which indicates prior vaccination or measles infection at an undetermined time. Twelve of the unvaccinated patients were infants too young to be vaccinated.”

Now Dave, you claim to be some sort of computer professional; you should be able to figure this out. First, let’s subtract 47 (unknown status patients) from 110. Ok, here’s our answer-63 had records, or known vaccine status. Of these 63, 49 were unvaccinated, including the 12 too young to be vaccinated. Now we divide 49 by 63 to get our percentage of unvaccinated, among those with known status. Viola! .7777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 Move the decimal point two places to the right and you get 77.7% were unvaccinated.

Now, epidemiologically, we can’t say anything about these 47 who were unvaccinated. However, by clinical experience, anyone who has worked in immunizations can tell you these people are even LESS likely to be vaccinated than the 63 with records/known status. Why is that? Because it is SOP to give patients a record when they get vaccinated, and there is also the California Immunization Registry, a voluntary reporting system. Doctors also keep their own records. If someone cannot produce a record from one of those sources, it is likely they haven’t been vaccinated.

That there were no cases transimitted in ‘the school setting’ is probably because school was not in session when this happened.

“Among the 37 remaining vaccine-eligible patients, 28 (67%) were intentionally unvaccinated because of personal beliefs, and one was on an alternative plan for vaccination. Among the 28 intentionally unvaccinated patients, 18 were children (aged <18 years), and 10 were adults. Patients range in age from 6 weeks to 70 years; the median age is 22 years. Among the 84 patients with known
hospitalization status, 17 (20%) were hospitalized."
Ibid.

Wakefield is a fraud and you know it. The only individual vaccine he recommended was the one he held a patent for. He has no background in immunology; he was, and I emphasize was, a gastroenterologist, a field not having much to do with vaccines. It is also untrue that most of these kids' symptoms began shortly after MMR vaccination.

You document both your ignorance and your penchant for deliberately lying. Most of the Disneyland measles outbreak occurred in January so stop trying to make excuses for there being no documented cases of transmission in a school setting. Regardless of the reason, you seem oblivious to the hypocrisy that this outbreak was used to justify SB277.

Regarding the percentage of unvaccinated cases from California, you must subtract the 12 children who were too young to be vaccinated. This means that of the cases with known vaccination status 59% were unvaccinated.

Um…regarding Wakefield…your claim that “the only individual vaccine he recommended was the one he held a patent for”…wow…you really don’t know what you are talking about. First, Wakefield did in fact recommend individual measles, mumps and rubella vaccines back in 1998, when he published his Lancet paper. He especially recommended vaccination against measles. As for the vaccine he held a patent for, there never was any actual vaccine (so I’m not sure how he could recommend it) though he did file a patent for a “transfer factor” substance which could be considered a vaccine I guess…its purpose would be to treat someone who already has a chronic measles infection in their gut.

How do you come to the conclusion that the children’s symptoms did not begin shortly after MMR vaccine? This came straight from the parents of the children, Wakefield merely reported this in the discussion section of his paper.

AnnaPDE

Why would you have to subtract the 12 too young children?
The whole point is that vaccines protect against an infection that unvaccinated people easily get. The reason for the unvaccinated status does not come into this.
Sure, those 12 children had a good excuse not to be vaccinated – too young. All the more reason to immunise those who are old enough instead of keeping them unprotected and potential disease vectors willy-nilly.

FallsAngel

From my link: “On January 5, 2015, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) was notified about a suspected measles case. The patient was a hospitalized, unvaccinated child, aged 11 years with rash onset on December 28. The only notable travel history during the exposure period was a visit to one of two adjacent Disney theme parks located in Orange County, California. On the same day, CDPH received reports of four additional suspected measles cases in California residents and two in Utah residents, all of whom reported visiting one or both Disney theme parks during December 17–20. By January 7, seven California measles cases had been confirmed, and CDPH issued a press release and an Epidemic Information Exchange (Epi-X) notification to other states regarding this outbreak. Measles transmission is ongoing (Figure).”

Second semester did not start in the LA schools until Jan. 12, 2015. There would have been far more cases if school had been ongoing.

You can call me a liar and hypocrite all you want. The liar and hypocrite is Wakefield.

Mike Stevens

David, the facts regarding the California cases from the Disney outbreak are exactly as Falls Angel stated. She was not lying at all, and saying so reveals that it is you who is the liar.

If you wish her to adjust the unvaccinated cases to exclude those too young for vaccination, just say so, but don’t accuse her of lying just because she presented the factual data that reveals how the unvaccinated had relatively more cases than expected.

The facts are these:

“Among the 110 California patients, 49 (45%) were unvaccinated; five (5%) had 1 dose of measles-containing vaccine, seven (6%) had 2 doses, one (1%) had 3 doses, 47 (43%) had unknown or undocumented vaccination status, and one (1%) had immunoglobulin G seropositivity documented, which indicates prior vaccination or measles infection at an
undetermined time.

So, of the 63 with known vaccination status, 49 were unvaccinated. Yes, 12 were kids too young to be vaccinated. Does that make it alright? I understand that 2 of the victims of the Disney outbreak nearly died, one required extracorporeal membrane oxygen therapy in ITU.

OK, let’s recalculate. Of those with known vaccination status and who were eligible for vaccination (51), there were 35 measles cases in unvaccinated persons (69%)

Happy now?

Mike Stevens

Wakefield certainly took out a patent for what he termed a “vaccine”, as shown below.
He thought this vaccine would be both a prophylactic against measles virus, and a therapeutic vaccine to deal with the damage he mistakenly thought measles virus (or vaccine strain virus) did to the bowel.
As you can see, he thought his vaccine would be safer (than MMR) in that it would not provoke bowel disease, as well as being therapeutic. The patent application states he thought it would also be effective for the elimination of rubella and mumps virus as well, and not just measles.

Wakefield hoped to corner a lucrative market, which he forecast would rake in £30 million each year, all channelled through his Isle of Man biologics company set up in his wife’s name to avoid tax.
What an altruistic and selfless man he is!!!

You keep referring to exposes from the BMJ. In one comment you provided two links. One link is to an article (an Op/Ed really) from Brian Deer, and the other link is from the editors of the BMJ talking *about* an article (the same article) from Brian Deer. This is all from Brian Deer, who in fact is the journalist who submitted the initial complaint about Wakefield and then proceeded to cover the story he started as he was an objective journalist. He is neither of these things.

Going forward please be honest and provide the correct attributions for your sources.

Also, I challenge you to find a primary source (i.e. not Brian Deer, and not someone commenting on an article about Brian Deer’s article) which discusses these matters, particularly Carmel Healthcare Ltd.

Nick Sanders

Those damn investigative journalists, uncovering facts and exposing fraudsters! Make sure you never cite them when discussing the fraudulent activities they uncovered.

I am in full support of investigative journalism, this is how most of the corruption gets uncovered in our world today…many topics you would not want to talk about.

But Deer is completely lacking in integrity. Its interesting you don’t want to discuss any of the content of my post, but let me reiterate. Deer submitted the original compliant to the GMC about Wakefield, and lied about it for years. He still will not answer this question directly. And then he proceeded to cover a story he had inserted himself into, presenting himself as a dispassionate observer.

He also lied directly to parents of the autistic kids in Wakefield’s 1998 Lancet case series study, misrepresenting his identity.

It’s telling that the parents of the children of the Lancet paper strongly and vehemently support Dr. Wakefield, because he was the first physician who listened to the parents and sought to actually treat their very sick children.

You think Deer lacks integrity because he is alleged to have misrepresented himself to parents in order to obtain the truth from them over their MMR/autism claims?
Most would consider that to be standard journalist MO, gaining the confidence of someone to discover and expose the real facts.
Of course the parents reacted badly and now hate Deer. They were shown by him to have been lying, and this undermined their case for vaccine damage litigation. What do you expect them to do… Say “Fair enough Brian! You caught us out, we were lying and our claims are bogus!”?

“Its interesting you don’t want to discuss any of the content of my post”
We have been discussing the content of your post. But I note that you seem to wish to be fixated in ad hominem slurs against Brian Deer and playing the man not the ball, rather than discussing the facts about Wakefield’s dishonesty and fraud.
You’d love to keep discussing the claims of parents who hate Deer, rather than discuss the facts. Why would that be?

Nick Sanders

I don’t know about you, but I’d sooner trust the reporter who misrepresented his identity to score an interview than the doctor who performed invasive experiments on children without ethics board approval. Every single time.

Mike Stevens

I am not quite sure where you are heading with this hair-splitting, David.

I provided a copy of Wakefield’s original patent application for you too see – I fail to see how less “primary” that could be as a source. I also cited the BMJ to back up my claim about the money that Wakefield had estimated he would make through setting up biologic companies to exploit the diagnostic, vaccine and therapeutic initiatives he was setting up.

“Also, I challenge you to find a primary source (i.e. not Brian Deer, and
not someone commenting on an article about Brian Deer’s article) which
discusses these matters, particularly Carmel Healthcare Ltd.”
Brian Deer is an international award winning investigative journalist who has published articles in several newspapers and also peer-reviewed articles in journals like the BMJ, including articles exposing Pharma companies and side effects of drugs such as cotrimoxazole). His series of investigations on the Wakefield/MMR fraud has won numerous press awards.

In them he provides a multiplicity of sources for the details on these companies set up by Wakefield such as Carmel Healthcare Ltd. Deer’s articles describe numerous items of correspondence between Wakefield, others involved in Carmel Healthcare, and the Royal Free hospital. These refer to original company documentation and reports, and presentations about Carmel Healthcare made by Wakefield.“Carmel Healthcare. Outline PR plan and action list ahead of Andrew
Wakefield’s presentation at the Pathological Society of Britain &
Ireland on 17/01/00”http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5258

Now you may choose to dismiss everything Deer has meticulously documented as being a lie (I presume this is why you insist on proof that has nothing to do with anything Deer found), but please recall that Wakefield has tried to sue Deer 4 times (IIRC) for libel and lost twice and withdrawn his action on the other occasions. Wakefield has also tried to claim the BMJ is wrong with its claims, yet instead of providing evidence to refute them, he has done nothing, apart from mutter vaguely about suing them which he has never done.

The BMJ series and the BMJ editorial are more than just some irrelevant “op ed” on this scandal – they are meticulously researched and referenced details of Wakefield’s fraud and dishonesty.

ETA: 24 of the 24 measles cases in Minneapolis are unvaccinated; only one is too young to be vaccinated.
See: Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Dr Kitty

David Foster- I didn’t say Polio, Measles and Rubella ARE eradicated, I said they could be with better vaccine uptake.

Polio remains endemic only on the countries with the lowest vaccination uptake.
Polio re-emerged in Syria just as the country went to hell in a hand basket and the vaccination schedule fell by the wayside, but well before basic sanitation and hygiene disappeared.

But like I said, it’s not like you’re capable of understanding that because
A) you dumb
And
B) inherent bias

Your logic is not even internally consistent, you have it exactly backwards. When a country like Syria goes “to hell in a hand basket” the very first thing to go IS basic sanitation and hygiene. This would have had an immediate effect. A drop in vaccination uptake will also have an impact, but there is any such thing as herd immunity then surely this impact would have taken some time.

Have a nice day.

Mike Stevens

Yup… dumb, and inherent bias.
Dr Kitty got it spot on.

Mike Stevens

“Your logic is not even internally consistent, you have it exactly
backwards. When a country like Syria goes “to hell in a hand basket” the
very first thing to go IS basic sanitation and hygiene.”

Now, according to what you have posted, I imagine you think that the polio came about because of the breakdown of hygiene and sanitation, against a background of dropping polio vaccination rates as the civil war escalated. Fine – I can go with that.

But think for a moment if you will… Is the situation regarding the environmental chaos from civil war in Syria now better than it was in 2014, or worse?
Did improved sanitation and hygiene miraculously come about and render Syria a clean and war-free zone, enabling polio to disappear through improved hygiene?
Or has the war situation greatly deteriorated, making the disappearance of polio in the face of that rather hard to fathom (if you subscribe to the sanitation only cause for polio), unless you invoke another factor for the elimination of polio since 2015 (ie the accelerated vaccination efforts)?

In simple terms –
Why did polio not continue to spread, seeing as how “sanitation and hygiene” have worsened?
Why did it disappear following the vaccination push?

JGC

“There is strong evidence indicating that the HepB shot is causing auto-immune reactions in infants, sometimes leading to permanent disability and death.”

Citations needed.

“This is confirmed by cases adjudicated in NVICP”

Which cases, exactly? Certainly not any in which compensation has been awarded for a table injury.

Mike Stevens

“There is strong evidence indicating that the HepB shot is causing
auto-immune reactions in infants, sometimes leading to permanent
disability and death. This is confirmed by cases adjudicated in NVICP.”

There are case reports, which don’t constitute “strong” evidence.
VICP claims data does not provide medical evidence, merely evidence compensation has been paid for a table injury. The table injuries listed for Hep B vaccine are as follows:

“Also…um…hate to break it to you but polio and measles are not eradicated.”
Dr Kitty never said they were. She said they could be eradicated. And indeed they could, if the antivaxers would stop disseminating their propaganda which keeps the diseases ticking over.

“This leads to a paradoxical situation whereby measles in highly
immunized societies occurs primarily among those previously immunized”
Congratulations! You have finally realised this. But these outbreaks are invariably small (as opposed to the tens of thousands seen in outbreaks in unvaccinated populations), and in almost every instance the measles has been introduced into the community from outside, usually from an unvaccinated person who acquired measles who was stupid enough to be travelling in an endemic measles country without having protective vaccination.

You like to cite articles about measles David, but in every one you seem to miss the point.

For instance, you cited a study from Italy which said:“Data stratified by age group showed that the hospitalization rate
significantly increased in young adults over the study period,
confirming an increase in susceptibility to measles in this
subpopulation.”

“When making a decision about whether to vaccine one’s own baby here in the US, does it really matter how endemic the disease is in the developing world?”

Only if there are vehicles that allow people to travel between nations in a matter of hours or days–say, something like a cylindrical tube full of seats for passengers that moves rapidly through the air from one place to another, perhaps even on some kind of regular schedule.

Wonder what you’d call something like that?

FallsAngel

“Note to self…do not allow children to chew other people’s chewed up food.”

Oh, aren’t you funny, not! Kids do get into things. In some cultures, it’s also common for moms to chew the food first, before giving it to baby.

“This offended her…clearly a defensive reaction. Time to find a different doctor.”
You can be almost 100% certain your doctor is aware of the differences between injection and ingestion. She’s probably also intelligent enough and educated enough to know that some ingested aluminum; e.g. in the source of say, antacid tablets for someone your age since I’ll presume you are not drinking breast milk or formula; gets into the bloodstream, and once it is in the bloodstream acts the same way as the injected AL. She’s probably also knowledgeable enough to know what you don’t, that is, the only adjuvanted flu vaccine approved in the US is only approved for people >65. She probably thought, rightly so, that you were full of sh*t!

LOL at “defensive”. The cardinal sin of mental health! Attack someone, and don’t expect them to defend themselves.

Mike Stevens

“Time to find a different doctor.”

I really don’t know why you’d bother, David, seeing as how you imagine you know more than all of them put together.

“Then I asked her if, as a physician, she was familiar with the
difference between ingestion and injection, and if she was aware that
ingested aluminum is in a very different form than the aluminum salts
used in vaccines. This offended her…”

I’m not surprised she was offended by your snide remarks. You clearly need to go to charm school, as well as getting some basic lessons in chemistry and physiology.

As to your point with not allowing your kid to put someone’s chewed-up food in their mouths: You clearly haven’t been around toddlers a lot. They want to try the taste of pretty much everything around them, including stuff on the floor, in rubbish bins, in drawers, etc., and you just can’t baby-proof the outside world to a degree that they never ever will get to put anything potentially contaminated in their mouth. So unless you’re planning on containing the kid in an impermeable bubble for the first few years, it’s a very smart move to protect them from the diseases they can catch by chewing and licking random dirty stuff.

Pck

That doctor is eternally grateful for your departure.

FallsAngel

That’s baloney sabel. One of the biggest risk factors after maternally-acquired infection is living with someone with Hep B. That can change overnight, as when someone new moves into the household.

FallsAngel

Why don’t you post a citation of this happening.

Sarah

You don’t think babies living in the same household as someone who’s Hep B but who isn’t their mother are in any danger then?

sabelmouse

are they biting each other?

Roadstergal

It certainly happens that siblings bite each other. :p However, there are far more likely transmission scenarios. Given that HepB can survive in biofluids for at least a week and often over a month, and can infect through the mucosa, you just have to think of a scenario like:
-Person in household coughs/sneezes, or has a cut finger, and leaves a little contaminated biofluid on the floor or on a lower cabinet. It doesn’t need to be massive amounts, it can be quite small, easy to miss.
-Baby/toddler is crawling around and gets virus on hands sometime within a month of that, and puts fingers in mouths. (Oh, we all know how little babies like to put things in their mouths, yeah? :p)

Given that chronic HepB is underdiagnosed (because the symptoms can be very generic until your liver starts to go, and a lot of folk don’t understand how contagious it is), this is not terribly unlikely.

FallsAngel

Yes plus, 30% of Hep B cases have no known transmission source. That tells me there’s a lot we don’t know yet about Hep B transmission.

sabelmouse

it’s like final destination!

Roadstergal

Is this sabelmouse-speak for “Babies and toddlers never stick their fingers in their mouths”?

Roadstergal

Here’s another one.

Guy is HepB+. He’s a goofy high school kid, so he’s snuck out to the park at night with his friends and is playing on the swingsets, swinging higher and higher. He doesn’t stick the landing, and scrapes his knees and elbows on the wood chips, leaving some infected blood to dry.

On a sunny afternoon a few days later, a little girl is getting her very first outing in the big bad world, toddling and crawling around with vim and vigor. Before caretaker can take it from her, she’s grabbed a woodchip and, as is the instinct of kids that age, jammed it in her mouth.

Hey, that ~30% of infections where they just can’t determine a source? There are all kinds of scenarios that are in keeping with the biology.

Sarah

You can give me your answer for both biting and not biting each other if you like.

I’ll wait.

Nick Sanders

YES!

Have you not met babies?

sabelmouse

hyena babies?

Empress of the Iguana People

them too.
My 10 month old bit her brother’s hand last week

sabelmouse

my children, who fought like hyena babies, must have been spectacularly unbitey.

rosewater1

My niece, when asked what her name was as a toddler, would say “Annie don’t bite.”

sabelmouse

i did meet a child like that once.

sabelmouse

i did meet a child like that once.

rosewater1

I’m happy to say she grew out of it! Or, more likely, she got bored with it. That was (and still is) the only way to get her to stop doing something. Strong willed is pitting it mildly. It did make her a challenge as a child and as an adolescent. She’s quite the awesome strong woman now. (yes, I’m biased.)

Heidi

I vividly being at a family reunion in the 90s and introducing myself to a distant toddler cousin, Benji. For whatever reason he decided to reciprocate with a skin breaking, blood drawing bite to my arm.

FallsAngel

I think I already said this, but here we go again: One of the biggest risk factors for infants, in addition to getting it from an infected mother, is living with someone with Hep B, either active or chronic. Considering a lot of people have so symptoms until they’re far along, that could be just about anyone in the household. And, that situation can change overnight, if someone new moves in.

sabelmouse

don’t give them to babies to gnaw on!

Mike Stevens

“only babies of heb b positive mothers are remotely in danger from the actual disease.”

So… the 6 thousand or so children who caught Hep B in infancy and childhood each year in the US (despite not having Hep B positive mothers) count for absolutely nothing?

Roadstergal

I’ve been assured that all of these babies were prostitutes and IV drug users. :p

Nick Sanders

At a rate of less than 0.0001%. It’s not perfectly safe, but it’s a damn sight closer than most things. (I’m assuming you meant to say the hep b vaccine and not just hep b, because we all know you think diseases are harmless)

Oh, and it looks nothing like severe dehydration or shaken baby syndrome when it does happen.

Azuran

There is a freaking autopsyy report. They did find out what was wrong.

Roadstergal

There were doctor’s notes, LC notes, admission notes, medical records, and an autopsy. But sabelmouse just KNOWS it wasn’t simple dehydration from lack of breast milk. Otherwise, she’d have to cop outright to the plain fact that bottle of formula offered post-nursing to make sure a baby is getting enough is, for sabelmouse, _literally_ a fate worse than death.

Amy Tuteur, MD

Here’s the autopsy report. The baby died of dehydration that led to cardiac arrest and brain damage — exactly as his mother said.

I can not fathom the heartache this family has had to bare. The shock of learning that her helpless infant died from dehydration all the while believing that the endless nursing sessions were of value. THis story has put me in alarm/alert mode and I now ask more detailed questions to the parents that call on me for my lactation support.

Amazed

As a true compassionate provider should do. Some people… don’t. Even when tiny little lives are preventably lost.

Poor baby, poor family.

kilda

yes, and the hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy is a RESULT of the cardiac arrest – not a pre-existing condition that led to it, as someone upthread tried to imply.

mamajb

What is pneuonia?? There were also “other undetermined factors”. Those could have been due to his birth circumstances.

Azuran

Why is it so hard for you to accept that a baby could die of dehydratation? It’s not as if ‘dehydratation’ itself is something special. Yet you’d rather believe in some imaginary illness that couldn’t even be detected in an autopsy

mamajb

I never said nor do I believe that a baby can not die of dehydration or breastmilk starvation. Because I know it happens. As I posted earlier:

“Yes, sadly babies die. Some breastfed babies die because their mothers are not informed as to what to look for and when to call the doctor. This is not an issue with breastmilk or the mother, but a FAILURE of our medical system to 1. Educate doctors in medical school about human lactation. 2. Educate nurses in nursing school about human lactation and an over all lack of support for breastfeeding mothers in Westernized countries – where breastfeeding is generally not accepted and hidden behind hooter hiders.
When breastfeeding is not going well, doctors, nurses and mothers should KNOW that it is not, and take the necessary steps to correct it.”

The issue with any baby dying from breastmilk starvation is a sad but true failure on the part of the doctors and nurses who are responsible for both the mother and infant’s well being. They have a legal and ethical responsibility to inform (educate), diagnose and treat. The fact that they got little to no education on human lactation in medical/nursing school is no excuse. Abundant educational opportunities exist.
And, if a lactation consultant is not capable of identifying dehydration/starvation [she] should get more training or find another line of work.

Heidi

Fucking “hooter hiders” didn’t kill Landon. But hey why not insult women who aren’t comfortable being exposed while breastfeeding while you’re at it? Not getting enough of an appropriate substance did and peeps like you play a pretty big role in what happened. Just look at what you’ve said here.

mamajb

Did I say hooter hiders killed Landon. Please Heidi.
And I wasn’t insulting women who use them. I am insulting a culture that shames women from feeling comfortable (breast) feeding their infants in public. Very few countries in the world do not accept breastfeeding in public. in just 100 years we went from full acceptance to……this.
And, BTW, I was never “exposed” when breastfeeding in public. In today’s social climate it is very possible to breastfeed discreetly.
I just think it is SAD that women are shamed into hiding when they need to feed their infant.

Heidi

You kinda did. According to you, lack of breast milk didn’t kill Landon but lack of support because evidently doctors and staff haven’t witnessed enough non-hooter hiding breastfeeding.

mamajb

HUH?

Heidi

Just summarizing your long-winded spiel for you.

Azuran

You think breastfeeding isn’t accepted and hidden behind door?
Seriously, you are kinda arguing our point. What do you think we are advocating for?
Breastfeeding isn’t perfect, it can fail, and we are arguing that the possibility and the signs of lactation failure should be known, recognized and treated properly. It is both an issue about breastfeeding and medical system (mainly lactation consultant) Not a problem of support.

Also, might I remind you that you said: There were also “other undetermined factors”. Those could have been due to his birth circumstances.
So yea, you are trying to deny that Landon was killed because people wouldn’t acknowledge that he was starving.

mamajb

Yeh Azuran, I am kinda arguing your point. ABSOLUTELY the signs of lactation failure should be known, recognized and treated properly. That is a no brainer. I don’t think anyone here is saying anything less.
I disagree about “mainly lactation consultant”. The reason is that currently, a well trained lactation consultant (IBCLC) has far and above more and better training in human lactation than either OB’s, Pedi’s or nurses. Both doctors and nurses agree with that. The only time that is not true is if they too went through the IBCLC training — and I know some who have done just that.
Our maternity care system is failing us and needs to be fixed. An important part of the fixing is to make in depth human lactation courses mandatory for all OB’s, Pedi’s, RN’s, GP’s and FP’s.
It is NOT common – at all – for mothers to come in contact with a IBCLC at anytime during her pregnancy or during lactation.

Lilly de Lure

But Landon’s mother did have access to a lactation consultant and was told to keep on trying to breastfeed regardless – just as she had by the nurses so evidently this “in depth education in human lactation” you boast of didn’t amount to very much that was practically useful in this case.

Azuran

From my very first appointment I’ve been given about a dozen of pamphlet about the la leche league, a list of lactation consultants, a list of breastfeeding club, breastfeeding match up etc. I have at least 15 different ressources to help me breastfeeding.
And that is without counting how all the doctors, pedi, nurses and LC in the hospital ALL checked me breastfeeding.

Azuran

The problem is that all those people, (and I said mainly lactation consultant because, as lactation consultant, their only purpose is to help breastfeeding mothers) are all so deep in the woo of ‘breast is best’ ‘There isn’t such a thing as not enough breastmilk’ that they are ignoring very obvious signs of breastfeeding failure in the name of ‘exclusive breastfeeding’
Landon hasn’t died because his mother wasn’t supported in breastfeeding. And all those stories on fed is best didn’t happen because women didn’t receive breastfeeding help.
They happened because the people who helped them breastfeeding don’t actually believe breastfeeding can fail and are pushing dangerous breastfeeding practice because of their extreme ideology.

Nick Sanders

“It happens in general, but never in particular.”

Roadstergal

They could have been due to aliens. Hey, as long as you’re speculating and digging for zebras while a big Clydesdale is battering down the door.

Azuran

You obviously don’t have much experience working with pathologists.
This ‘undetermined factors’ is just pathologist giving themselves wiggle room. Medicine isn’t like math. You only say that you are 100% sure of something when you are 200% sure of it.
Basically what this means is: Absolutely everything points to the cause of death being brain damage, following cardiac arrest because of dehydration. But, even though there is absolutely 0 evidence that it could be something else, we can’t be absolutely 100% certain that it wasn’t caused by some other weird, unknown disease that isn’t detectable.

The Bofa on the Sofa

You obviously don’t have much experience working with pathologists.

Personally, I try not to. :() Pathologists scare me.

Roadstergal

Wha? I love pathologists! Second only to biostatisticians.

The Bofa on the Sofa

As I said, pathologists scare me. Very scary people.
1) First, they are off-the-scale smart. Absolutely among the smartest people I have ever met
2) On the other hand, pathologists are like the strangest people. Their fascination with things pathological is not normal.https://youtu.be/NQ12s6AxL0w

Maybe it’s just the veterinarians, but those folks are scary.

Some of my best friends are pathologists (literally true). I love ’em, but they scare the crap out of me.

Azuran

I love pathologist, especially those working in macro-pathology, They have the coolest, grossest, weirdest shit in their labs.
(yea, I love super gross things. It’s a vet thing I think)

The Bofa on the Sofa

They have the coolest, grossest, weirdest shit in their labs.

That’s not the part that scares me. The part that scares me is that THEY LIKE IT

(yea, I love super gross things. It’s a vet thing I think)

No, it’s not a general vet thing. Just the scary ones.

Yeah, vets have to deal with weird, super gross shit. I am lucky married to one because I can let my wife clean up the dog vomit and poop (not because it’s her job, but because she doesn’t gag while doing it like I do). That’s all part of her job, and she is used to it.

Doesn’t mean you have to LIKE it, though. She doesn’t. Pathologists..otoh, get off on it.

“Abby, your dog pooped in the house!”
“Ooooo, let me see it! What did he eat?”

Roadstergal

Hm, we might be dealing with a different set of pathologists. The ones I work with aren’t massively interested in poop; they’re interested in organs, and specifically in the diversity you see in healthy organs that helps give context when you’re looking at diseased/damaged ones. I find it fascinating!

Azuran

XD I mostly meant really interesting, severe or gross pathology. Like cyclops or two headed kittens. Not actual poop

myrewyn

I love gross things too. My vets seem to know this and they always tell me the best stories.

myrewyn

One of our regulars here is a pathologist, right?? I can’t recall her name right now. British, maybe?

Charybdis

Mabelcruet, I think.

myrewyn

Yes!

Heidi_storage

Ooh, I used to know a biostatistician who was huge, over 6 feet and well-built; he was the sweetest teddy bear ever.

MaineJen

Oh jesus. Grasp at straws much? Just stop.

sabelmouse

thank you.

Roadstergal

Wow, she’s one of those baby abuser apologists. Babies never get shaken to death, it’s vaccines!

Shitheels of the world are complaining about being compared to her.

Nick Sanders

And yet I’m supposed to respect her? Fuck that noise.

Roadstergal

Remember, according to Mama JB, the lactation consultant, saying ‘fuck’ is disrespectful – but defending baby abusers/killers and suggesting a loss mother is either a ‘dupe’ or actively lying about the well-documented facts of the death of her baby is not.

StephanieJR

There are serial killers I’d rather have dinner with. The lack of empathy is disturbing.

rosewater1

They already did. Reread the autopsy report. Why isn’t that enough for you?
Don’t you think that if something else killed Landon, his family would want to know?
Perhaps the reason you can’t find out more about this is because there’s nothing more to this. A baby starved to death. The End.

sabelmouse

like those autopsies claiming that vaccine injury/scurvy is shaken baby syndrome?

rosewater1

I’m sorry, what? What does that have to do with this case?
If you have issues with THOSE autopsies, go rail against them on another page. Or start your own.
If you have issues with those autopsies, that automatically makes all autopsies suspect?
You know what, no. I don’t buy it. You don’t believe any such thing. You’re sitting at your computer or your phone, chortling over how riled up everyone gets when you say things like this.
You’re not even being subtle about it.

Azuran

Of course you are one of those dumbasses who think shaken baby syndrome is a vaccine injury. There really is no limit to how low you can get.

sabelmouse

i think you’re a candidate for blocking. you’re not even entertaining.

Azuran

Oh please, go ahead, block me. As if that’s going to make me sad or something

Azuran

And I’m not trying to entertain you. I’m just point out how horrible of a person you are so that other people don’t believe your crap.

Nick Sanders

Vaccines and scurvy do not produce blunt force trauma and overextended ligaments/tendons.

sabelmouse

blunt force trauma it is now?
we must be talking about different cases. i didn’t say that child abuse doesn’t happen.

Nick Sanders

Shaken Baby Syndrome is diagnosed based partly on the presence of blunt force trauma, especially to the brain.

sabelmouse

breastfeeding ”industry”? what are they selling?

Heidi

Pumps, flanges, shields, nipples, bottles, tubing, flaps, covers, pillows, cookies, teas, supplements, books, $300+ per hour consultation fees, lip and tongue tie cutting (has a low success rate even and can cost just as much as buying a year’s supply of formula that will likely have to be bought when the cut fails), craniosacral therapy, classes, bras, pads, nipple creams, jewelry – just to name a few.

sabelmouse

i breastfed without any of those. except books. i’ll always have books.
then again, i have and have had good libraries.

Who?

So you and Heidi and the other posters all have different needs and wishes.

Your needs and wishes are not better or even preferable to anyone else’s, and certainly doesn’t mean any of the things others needed or found useful were unnecessary or useless.

sabelmouse

and yet we’ve breastfed since forever and those things were mostly not around.
ditto so much other baby paraphernalia.

Heidi

And babies have died in droves forever too. Bottles have been found in the pyramids. Romans had a recipe for formula. Breastfeeding has failed since forever. Maybe read some history books from that well-funded library of yours.

sabelmouse

sure! very occasionally. and of course rich women gave there’s to nursemaids.

Azuran

And the poor who couldn’t afford nursemaids just died

sabelmouse

not necessarily. also baby farming was often terrible. because of social injustice.

Heidi

No, not occasionally.

sabelmouse

yes, just like ALL the babies died before vaccines, and not because of poverty either.

Heidi

Are you upset there hasn’t been a post about vaccination lately? So you ask what the breastfeeding industry sells as a super complicated way to bring it up? Pretty desperate.

sabelmouse

there’s always something about vaccination.

rosewater1

Very occasionally? Go for a walk in an old graveyard. Look at some headstones for infants. Look at the birth and death rates. And those are for the people who could afford to be buried there. Poor families couldn’t.
No, breastfeeding issues didn’t kill all of them. But they sure didn’t help.

sabelmouse

lot’s of issues in the olden days, lot’s of ignorance as well.
isn’t it usually a lack of vaccines what killed them?

Azuran

are you being stupid on purpose?
Many things killed babies and children back then.
Some died in childbirth
Some died due to insufficient milk or complication from usafe supplementation before formula was a thing.
some died of vpd
some died of malnutrition
some died due to lack of medical care

The death rate for children under 5 reached 50% in many places, and much of that death occurred in the first year of life. Now, granted, a lot of that isn’t starvation from lack of breastmilk, but a lot of it is. I don’t think that’s occasional.

Azuran

Are you cooking your food on a fire in your yard? Because that’s how we’ve cooked our meat since forever. Obviously no one needs a oven or a microwave.

sabelmouse

i certainly don’t use a microwave and would be very happy to have an aga type thing.

sabelmouse: “i’ll always have books.
then again, i have and have had good libraries.”

Question, if I may.

Did you ever finish colouring in them?

Empress of the Iguana People

(Psst, You aren’t supposed to color in library books. ;p )
Actually, I do color in maps when they’re black and white and in my own books. Easier to read.

moto_librarian

My, aren’t we just dripping with privilege! If you never needed a pump, that means that you had the luxury of staying home. Most of us go back to work after having babies, often with little to no maternity leave. Libraries are also taxpayer-funded, so if you had a “good” one, you probably live in an affluent area. Aren’t you special.

sabelmouse

well, i am NOT in the usa.

Heidi

Well, you know I skipped the LC because ain’t no amount of consulting going to make my breasts produce abundant milk. I made some milk but the only way my baby was having any of it is if I extracted it and gave it to him in a bottle. He got over breastfeeding for an hour and a half for very little milk. Can’t blame him for having nothing to do with it. So essentially fuck​ you, you’re an awful person. You are the tool that asked what the industry was selling and I gave you an answer. Why you went through this convoluted way just to brag about your good breast feeding and library fortune is beyond me.

sabelmouse

what’s LC?
and am i forcing you to breastfeed?

Charybdis

Really? LC = Lactation Consultant. IBCLC = International Board Certified Lactation Consultant.
And no, you aren’t forcing anyone to breastfeed, but your disingenuous questions about breastfeeding and the breastfeeding industry are rather pathetic.

sabelmouse

ok.

Heidi

Did I force you to come on here and be an asshole?

Roadstergal

Honestly, I think we did. Amy noting that breastfeeding isn’t perfect and that formula is a good way to feed a baby is like a bat-signal to these sorts. (Feel free to visualize what the asshole-signal looks like against the clouds.)

sabelmouse

you could stop replying. it’s like stepping into a hornets nest.
you’re a hive just waiting for the unwary traveler.

Heidi

Go back to lurking and upvoting dietdee then.

You got the answer to your original question. You are the hornet.

The Bofa on the Sofa

Yeah, she’s resorted to trolling.

sabelmouse

i don’t lurk dear, i follow people.
once again regret going near one of these sites.
have fun talking among yourselves.

Azuran

Seriously, before commenting on anything, you should just look on what blog you are commenting on. Seems to me like you keep ‘Accidentally’ ending up here.

rosewater1

I used to work in retail. You remind me of the customers who stomped out shouting they were NEVER coming back again! NEVER! They always did and I suspect you will too.

sabelmouse

if someone that i follow comment here i might. it’s amusing for a short period.

Roadstergal

Sabelmouse finds dead babies amusing.

For a short period.

I guess she just gets bored of ’em after that.

sabelmouse

and there we have the shill signature.
no, i find youse amusing, until you become annoying.
doesn’t take long.

Roadstergal

I got shill bingo! 😀

Now where is that check from (insert name of evil company)? I am really getting tired of doing all of this for free.

Ah. Now I understand. You’re looking for amusement. You might want to go back and read the original post. Pay special attention to the part where she talks about baby Landon dying. The outrage that people have for breastfeeding going horribly wrong and what it cost this child. That amuses you. The struggles that other women have with breastfeeding. That amuses you. You are vile.
I’m off to work. I work in a hospital OB unit. Where breastfeeding is encouraged. BUT one where peds and lactation work in tandem to keep this from happening. Babies are sent home with strict feeding plans. Or not sent home at all until it’s safe. Thank God.
sabel, I’m sure you will disregard what I typed. But hopefully someone else will read this-maybe even someone who followed YOU here-might listen.

Roadstergal

We’re not replying for your benefit, because we know you’re an ideologue. We’re replying for any lurkers reading, to lay bare the evil undercurrents of the ‘breastfeeding is perfect, formula is poison’ ideology. Of how happy you are to have babies starve to prove you’re a ‘better mom’ than their moms.

It’s proven convincing for some who are ‘on the fence,’ and I’m all for that. I like happy, fed, living babies, who grow up to be happy adults with functioning brains.

Lilly de Lure

And how precisely do you think those books on breastfeeding got into your good libraries – do you think the authors wrote them for nothing and then gave them away free?

sabelmouse

best ban books about pregnancy,birthing, and breastfeeding/baby care then. lest they impact the profits of others.

rosewater1

You are quite willfully missing the point. YOU have access to good libraries. Not everyone does.
YOU had no need for teas, supplements, etc. Plenty of women try them to help with breastfeeding.
And finally, YOU breastfed 2 babies successfully. Not everyone can.
And I think you know that. You aren’t stupid. I think you’re enjoying the attention and the drama your postings create.

Azuran

Let me guess, you don’t believe there is an ‘alternative medicine’ industry either.

Breastfeeding so far has cost me about 300$ in clothes, bras, pads and nipple cream. And that’s because my SIL actually GAVE me her breast pump. And I’m lucky, my baby is a breastfeeding champion and basically had a perfect latch from the very first time I put her to my breasts so I didn’t need any supplement or LC.

sabelmouse

i breastfed 2 and never used any of that.

Heidi_storage

Yay, you get a cookie. We bow down to your superior boobies and babies. However, take a look at popular breastfeeding sites such as Kellymom. If there’s any problem with breastfeeding, the site is likely to recommend a product or service–lanolin for cracked nipples, supplements for low supply, lactation consultant for feeding difficulties, tongue/lip tie surgeries, etc. And in the real world, there are almost always difficulties, especially at first.

Finally, to stay healthy while breastfeeding, you should be eating extra nutritious food, and taking a supplement as well. That costs money. Breastfeeding is not free.

sabelmouse

lanolin is great, and hard to get in places, these days. i’ve always used it for milking, and in my own cremes.

cremes that i use for face and body. many women do. men even.

good food is also great. even while pregnant, it kind of goes with the territory and it’s certainly more sensible for one’s health.

are you seriously saying that recommending good nutrition for a breastfeeding mother is part of an industry?

yes, i had difficulties, luckily sheila kitzinger, got all her books from the lib, told me what to do.

then again, i didn’t buy all that other baby para either.

saved so much money that way.

you could use this slogan though.

starve the mother,feed the baby, save money. not sure that would really work out so well.

Mishimoo

Since we’re going with anecdotes, I have such good nutrition that a qualified nutritionist asked me to enjoy more cheese. Still doesn’t change the fact that my body doesn’t properly process vitamins and requires a higher dose than a healthy diet provides, or that there would be many other women with similar or worse issues.

sabelmouse

and without breastfeeding you wouldn’t?

Mishimoo

That IS without currently breastfeeding. 6 months post-weaning, my calcium levels were low enough that a usually unflappable doctor ran into the treatment room while I was there for another matter to tell me I needed to start taking extra supplements immediately.

Lilly de Lure

So, in essence your argument is that there is no industry because you personally didn’t buy much. Got it. (Hint: I don’t buy moisturiser creams as a rule – do you think that means the beauty industry doesn’t exist?).

sabelmouse

there is an industry if people are stupid enough to buy stuff.
that doesn’t mean that you need it to breastfeed.
it’s mostly avoidable .

Roadstergal

Your question was ‘what are they selling?’ We answered it. The breastfeeding industry is selling these products and making very good money doing so. Your personal judgment on the necessity of what they’re selling changes that not one bit.

sabelmouse

and you are saying people should buy formula instead even though they don’t need most things that the breastfeeding industry is selling.
next on the list;evil maternity clothes manufacturers.

Roadstergal

Nope. You’re very bad at reading comprehension.

sabelmouse

just making fun of your ridiculousness.

Roadstergal

You’re also quite bad at that. 🙂

The breastfeeding industry exists and makes good money. To claim that there’s no financial incentive to demonize formula and pretend breastfeeding is perfect is naïve in the extreme. Your own claim that your sweet little tits could support your babes with no auxiliary support has as much to do with that reality as the price of tea in China.

This duo of formula demonization and pretending breastfeeding is perfect has, and does, kill babies. Your own personal experience changes that reality not one bit.

sabelmouse

sure.
now lets talk about nestle killing babies with formula.

Roadstergal

It’s been discussed by Dr T in the past.

What has not been covered is any small moment you’ve taken to express a shred of remorse and responsibility for the ‘breastfeeding is perfect, formula is poison’ bullshit and the lives it has claimed. I think no such moment exists.

rosewater1

Certainly. Go right ahead. No one is stopping you. The information’s out there. Google Search works for that also.
But it cuts both ways, sabel. Like it or not, the problems discussed in here are real. They do happen. To real people. And real babies.
Just because it didn’t happen to you doesn’t mean it can’t happen or hasn’t happened to anyone else.

Mike Stevens

“now lets talk about nestle killing babies with formula.”
But because that didn’t happen to my kids, then according to your usual fallacious reasoning that means it didn’t happen to any of them, right?

Nick Sanders

Nestle being an evil company does not make all formula bad.

sabelmouse

i didn’t say that but since there were talk of babies dying.
babies dying for profit.

Nick Sanders

Don’t be coy, you know damn well what you were implying.

sabelmouse

i’m not implying anything. i am saying that the corporation killed babies. they also enslave children for cocoa.
they are among the most nefarious.

Nick Sanders

And by implication, formula the product is evil as well.

sabelmouse

sure, deflect from the evil of nestle, and other corps.
show how much you really care.

Nick Sanders

I’m not the one deflecting here.

Azuran

We aren’t saying that they are evil. Just that the industry exists.
Maybe you don’t strictly NEED everything they sell, but many of those make yourself come comfortable and makes life easier. What is wrong with that?
Having a nursing pillow sure makes my life a LOT easier and more comfortable than using normal pillow.
Nursing bras also make my life a lot easier
Nipple cream helped a lot in the first few days.
Without nursing pads most of my clothes would be ruined by leaking breastmilk by now.

sabelmouse

so why are you denigrating the ”industry”?

Charybdis

Not denigrating the breastfeeding “industry”. It is disingenuous to imply that there is no money to be made or spent in the pursuit of breastfeeding. Which is what you ARE doing.

sabelmouse

there is IF people buy into it.

Azuran

I am not denigrating it. You claimed there wasn’t one, we are showing you that it does exist.

Roadstergal

I’ve been a female in the professional world for many years, and never wear a lick of makeup. By sabelmouse logic, that means that the professional ‘beauty’ industry does not exist and makes no money.

Azuran

Seriously, did you really comment on EVERYONE’S comments telling how YOU never need any of this? My god you really are something.
Just because YOU apparently didn’t need anything, doesn’t mean it’s the case for everyone else, get your head out of your ass.

sabelmouse

my point is not that i didn’t need it but that most don’t need it.and didn’t for millennia.

Azuran

And lots of baby have died because their mother didn’t have access to some of those.
Supplementation has been around for a really long while.

If you have a large chest, bra’s that are sized s-xl are a fucking joke. If you fit into conventional sizes that is great is great for you but a lot of women don’t and we have to pay either pay up the nose for bras or suffer back pain and self-consciousness.

FallsAngel

Isn’t that the case for a regular bra, too?

LibrarianSarah

Yes it does but just like I need a different bra to play sports or work out, women who breastfeed need a special bra for that. So I pay $80 for a regular bra, $60 for a sports bra and god know how much for a nursing bra. Chesty women have to pay a lot of money for bras.

So when someone who is lucky enough to fit into standard sizes says “lol you spend that much on bras I just get mine a walmart for pennies” we want to hit them.

FallsAngel

I breastfed two babies and while nursing bras are helpful, they’re not an absolute necessity.

And do hit me.

LibrarianSarah

Just because something wasn’t necessary for you doesn’t mean it won’t be for someone else. The whole “oh I didn’t need this therefore no one else should need it either” attitude is just a demonstration of your own lack of empathy.

And even if it is “helpful” and not an “absolute necessity,” it is still a product that breastfeeding women need to pay for. I mean the only things that are “absolute necessities” are food, water, and shelter. Are those the only things that you spend you money on? And if not don’t you still feel you “need” some of those non-essential things?

FallsAngel

I just posted a list of breast feeding items entitled “What breastfeeding supplies do I need?” Considering Disqus’ foibles, I’ll post it again so you don’t have to search. http://kellymom.com/pregnancy/bf-prep/breastfeeding-supplies2/ Note that practically nothing is actually “needed”. The author also elaborated on what she presonally found helpful.

If everything goes as planned practically nothing is needed but what if your milk doesn’t come in? Or the latch is wrong? Or something else is not working? That is when lactation consultants, lactation teas/cookies/oatmeal/supplements and even prescription medication is marketed too you. Any you might feel like you need it because nothing else is working.

What if you have to go back to work in 4 weeks after giving birth? Or your baby can’t or won’t get milk from the breast? Well that is when breast pumps, and milk storage containers are marketed to you and you might feel like you “need” it because you can’t be around your child every time it is hungry.

What if your nipples get chapped or cracked? Then nipple cream will be marketed to you and you might feel like you need it because ouch.

What if the very thought of showing any part of your breasts in public makes you anxious and you are not sure if you can do the “quick change.” Then, nursing bras and all the cover ups are marketed to you and you might feel you need it because you really don’t want to “expose yourself” to people.

And guess what? I agree that a lot of the stuff on the list are not stuff that people “need.” But most industries don’t cater to peoples needs. They cater to people’s wants. Even if no woman ever needed any of the services or product sold by the breastfeeding industry doesn’t mean their isn’t an industry. Nobody needs cable but there is still a cable industry.

The act of breastfeeding isn’t an industry but an industry has been built up around it.

Roadstergal

“The act of breastfeeding isn’t an industry but an industry has been built up around it.”

You said it far better than I was scrambling to, above.

And the issue is that in order to grow, this industry has made a major goal out of demonizing a safe and often necessary product.

LibrarianSarah

And it only took me 5 paragraphs. Haha

FallsAngel

As I just said to someone else, there is plenty of level-headed advice “out there” meaning in the media today about what you really might need. I’m not going to repeat the whole thing.

LibrarianSarah

Regardless of whether you think it is necessary or if there are better or more frugal ways they should spend their money, a lot of people are still buying these things and a lot of other people are making their living selling these things.

You might not think it is needed and it might not have been necessary for you. But one group of people felt it so necessary that they were willing to set up shop and offer the services and another is willing to spend their hard earned money on those services. Hence, an industry has been built up around breast feeding.

And too be clear, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. That is capitalism in action and what has made America and much of the Western World what it is today. The problem is that one industry is trying to discredit the products of a related but competing industry buy telling the general population that the products that said industry makes are tantamount to poison and that only terrible people use them.

Azuran

Why do you have problem with calling it an ‘industry’?
Being an industry isn’t inherently bad, it’s just a thing.
Companies make product to help breastfeeding moms, it is an industry and there is nothing wrong with it being one.

That’s interesting. I do not see “entertainment” or “music”. It does seem silly to me to refer to everything these days as an “industry”.

Roadstergal

?

“25401030” “Movies and entertainment”

No matter how silly it seems to you, it’s a critical part of economics. The breastfeeding industry would probably fall under 351010, given that it mostly sells equipment and supplies. You can personally object to the word, but it’s a perfectly accurate description generally.

MaineJen

Huh.

Azuran

You might want to click on the arrow and look at the ‘other’ definitions, not just the first one:
a particular form or branch of economic or commercial activity.
Synonym: Business
example: Publishing industry.

Empress of the Iguana People

Sigh. I doubt walmart even sells the cup size i get to now “enjoy”. They do have one that has 4x, 5x, and 6x. Whatever that means for the cup size! THough in my case, I found I prefered my ordinary bra style in the new size to the nursing bra I bought. Can’t get my size in the store, but I can from their online.

LibrarianSarah

I just want a sports bra that keeps my boobs from bouncing all over the place every time I work out. I haven’t been able to do jumping jacks in public since the 6th grade. 🙁

I can recommend Sport Jock.
They look like they shouldn’t work, but they do, and the compression is mighty but comfy. Do try the size up and down from what they suggest, just to make sure the fit is right for you.

I wear mine both for working out (yoga, Pilates, general gym stuff) and sleeping and lounging around the house- that is how comfy.

I realised some time ago that I was not built for running or spin classes and no sports bra inthe world has been able to change my mind.

Dr Kitty

Do they do size 28G?
I guess no.
A small would fit my back, but not my breasts. An XL would accommodate my breasts, but probably be 6inches too big in the back.
Poorly fitting bras are a cause of blocked ducts and mastitis.
A good bra is not an optional extra.

Try finding a nursing bra in a non standard size for under $20 and given that you have to wear the damn things 24/7, you need at least 3 for hygiene reasons.

I like nice underwear, so I don’t mind getting good quality nursing bras (which are now my “relax at home in Pjs” bras), but they aren’t cheap.

Nick Sanders

28G? The mind boggles…

Roadstergal

Naïve question – if you’re not going to breastfeed, how long does it take for your breasts to ‘settle in’ and the milk to go away? Do you need a bra for transition, or can you just wrap them up until your regular bras fit?

EmbraceYourInnerCrone

Well this is just my sample size of 1 but, my milk came in about 3 days after my daughter was born. I used a couple of the bras I used while I was pregnant and stuck ice packs in them. it was an uncomfortable 2 days before they were close to back to normal after that.

EmbraceYourInnerCrone

probably wrapping tight with an Ace bandage or something would work too

Empress of the Iguana People

Well, my example is merely an anecdote and definitely an outlier, but I grew from DD to G at least during my first pregnancy. And they. Never. Shrank. aaarrrrggghhh.

You started this by replying to someone who said they got 6 bras for £100, who most likely can’t even order from Walmart. That’s only £17 per bra.

FallsAngel

“You started it”! Good Grief! No wonder I don’t come here often. I had about 4 responses to that post, mostly saying WM probably doesn’t carry “their” size.

Anyway, 100 pounds is $128.41 USD. So six bras were $21.40 USD, each. That’s not outrageous. Why would you need six? I don’t think I had more than 4, spread over two kids. You can probably get by with two if you had to. And I have no idea where Walmart ships. Probably anywhere.

maidmarian555

I needed that many because I went through 3 different cup sizes whilst breastfeeding and found wearing the wrong size unbearably uncomfortable. I didn’t buy a ridiculous amount at a time, my size kept changing and I needed bras that fit to accommodate that. Tbh, my original comment wasn’t really a complaint about nursing bra prices, I just found it questionable that sablemouse managed to breastfeed two children without spending even a penny on a single bra. Even if you didn’t buy a nursing bra, you’d need a comfy one without wires or whatever. I never got mastitis and they will do for #2 so I don’t feel like I wasted any money. Although knowing my fucking luck I’ll go down to a C cup next time or something.

FallsAngel

I see. I think this convo got a little off base. I, too, found nursing bras very convenient, and I wasn’t agreeing with sabel about that. I was mostly agreeing with her ridicule of the term breastfeeding “industry”. Having grown up in an industrial town, I tend to think of “industry” as steel mills, oil refineries and the like, not “Mom and Pop” shops selling breast-feeding supplies, or even “Babies R Us”.

Roadstergal

Oh, Babies R Us is a big industry. Baby clothes are a jaw-dropping industry, in their size and in their ability to convince moms and dads that they _need_ the stuff that’s being sold. You don’t need to be Gary, Indiana to be an industry. (I’m in a big industry that sells tiny little things, myself.)

FallsAngel

There is plenty of level-headed advice “out there” re: renting breast pumps; borrowing some supplies, say a nursing cover from a friend who is done with bf; asking for things as gifts, perhaps some of these nursing gowns (I made one of those for a friend as well); and buying small amounts of some things until you learn what you need/want.

LibrarianSarah

Industry, in this context, refers to a group of companies that offers similar services or products. You work in the Hospitality Industry regardless of whether you work at a small family inn or the Marriott.

FallsAngel

I think that word has been hyped a little.

myrewyn

I think I’ve bought six bras just for pregnancy changes — one that I needed for a special occasion dress and I think I’ve only worn twice. Sad. So yeah, getting away with not buying any bras through all the breast changes seems odd.

maidmarian555

I think the saddest thing these days is when I go into the back of my drawer and look at my lovely pre-baby pretty bras with bows and lace and wiring that I know I’ll probably never wear again. I can’t bring myself to throw them out yet! I too went through several maternity bras, my boobs were so sore the whole time with #1 I had to have giant comfy ones that fit properly. They really weren’t pretty at all.

myrewyn

Yeah, I had a pretty serious bra habit before and I don’t know if any of them will ever fit again. Push up, lace, gorgeous colors… average $60 apiece. There are women’s shelters that will take gently used bras so I will do that if it turns out I can’t wear those again. I don’t want to do the math to figure out what I’ve spent on my bra drawer…

Roadstergal

Ooh, pretty bras! I desperately wanted to wear my mom’s hand-me-downs, because they were so pretty, and would have if they were my size.

guest

I was lucky, no breast changes through either pregnancy or postpartum. I wore the same bras as always. It was a pretty good indicator to me that breastfeeding wasn’t going to happen.
Mine doesn’t seem to be a typical experience, though.

myrewyn

I do want to breastfeed so I’m grateful for the changes despite the expense of the bras at this point. I’m up almost three cup sizes and haven’t given birth yet 0.0

Dr Kitty

Motherhood maternity starts at a 32 back.
I don’t think something four inches too big around the band is going to give me anything approaching meaningful support, do you?

https://www.bravissimo.com/collections/nursing-and-soft-cup
This is where I get my bras. Not because I particularly *want* to spend £36 on a bra, but because shops (including M&S) don’t stock bras that fit me. I did try the nearest approximate sizes but they didn’t cut the mustard in terms of comfort and support, and really aren’t worth risking mastitis for.

It’s so nice that you can find $120 down the back of your sofa… that’s twice the weekly grocery budget for some women.

Look, just like some women can say “oh I don’t need to wear a bra” and will look perfectly lovely and feel absolutely comfy going bra-less, for some of us it just isn’t an option.

Just like it would show a serious lack of understanding and empathy for someone who wears a 34A to say “what do you mean you *have* to wear a bra just because you’re a 44F? I don’t wear bras and I’m perfectly fine!” you don’t seem to have worked out that just because you can buy cheap one-size-fits-all bras and be perfectly comfy doesn’t mean that it is a workable option for every woman.

FallsAngel

When did I say anything about spending $120 on nursing bras, or that I thought that was a drop in the bucket? For six bras, it is a drop in the bucket actually, but I did ask why anyone needed six nursing bras. When did I say anything about my bra size for that matter or what I bought? And then we get into the grocery money, and how I have absolutely no understanding because obviously I’m living off some trust fund (or something).

Good grief, I was trying to be helpful!

Dr Kitty

“Anyway, 100 pounds is $128.41 USD. So six bras were $21.40 USD, each. That’s not outrageous.”

“Why would you need six? I don’t think I had more than 4, spread over two kids. You can probably get by with two if you had to. ”

So that was you saying $120 was no big deal to spend on bras, you already said you bought $12 nursing bras from Walmart yourself, and that’s you saying you bought four.

Since you can wear standard sized bras, one has to assume you are standard sized and don’t have to buy your regular bras in specialist shops, no?

No one is saying you can’t find ways to be thrifty and I absolutely agree with you that most things sold by the lactation industry are unnecessary. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist and that people aren’t making money from women who breastfeed choosing to buy these goods and services.

You can express breast milk by hand and store it in recycled glass jars if you want, and it’ll cost you nothing but boiling water and soap if you want, but most women opt for pumps and sterile plastic bags.

You can nurse without a cover, bug one in a thrift store or make one from an old sheet if you want, but many women choose to buy one.

Breastfeeding doesn’t have to be expensive, but it can be, and there are definitely people making large profits from selling their products to nursing women.

FallsAngel

No, you dope! I meant $21.40 wasn’t a lot to spend on a bra. What a hateful forum!

myrewyn

I don’t see anything hateful — just women with different body types having different bra needs and some comments about how it’s lucky if you can fit into the cheap ones while you’re changing sizes through pregnancy and nursing.

maidmarian555

Yeah I don’t normally fit into s-xl sizes (plus in the UK and I couldn’t find any cheaper nursing bras in the supermarkets). I started off as a 38E and went down to a 34D over a period of 6 months. I don’t have an enormous chest but with a smallish back measurement and reasonable cup size, standard sizes don’t really work for me.

Valerie

Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever had any luck, either, with a one-dimensionally-sized bra. They fit sub-optimally on most people.

Roadstergal

Well, if you personally never used any of this, that definitely proves there’s no industry out there making good money selling it. Ipso facto, QED, etc.

Good for you. That’s still how people make money off breastfeeding women.

sabelmouse

people make money of formula feeding women.

Charybdis

From what, other than having to buy the formula, bottles and nipples? No creams, no pads, no pumps, no flanges, no “bottlefeeding consultant”, no pillows, no special clothes/bras, no supplements, no teas, no domperidone, etc.
Yes, purchasing formula, bottles and nipples is a cost. But it is not nearly as high as the lactivists like you to think it is. And the effort going in to making a bottle and then washing up afterwards is minimal. People are not making money hand over fist from formula feeding. Sorry.

Lilly de Lure

Well, there are sterilisers and you can get insulated bottlecovers to keep the boiled water in the bottles the correct temperature when you are out and about – but neither are very expensive (both are cheap compared to the price of even the cheapest breast pump – plus come to think of it you’ll need a steriliser if you use a breast pump even if you ebf).

FallsAngel

Sometimes insurance will pay for the breast pump. But really, I never used one. When I needed for someone else to feed my kid, I just used formula.

myrewyn

That’s my plan. I have zero desire to pump, like, ever.

Charybdis

True. I had forgotten about those, mainly because I never used them. I got some in my baby shower, but I never used them. Bottled water and dishwasher set to sanitize cycle was all I ever used.

Heidi

I even went all out and got a Baby​ Brezza but it was less than half the price one visit to an LC would have cost!

Yes they do. There’s nothing wrong with either group making money from providing needed goods and services- that is literally how our economy works.

However, you are claiming that there is no “breastfeeding industry”, which is complete bullshit. There is, indeed, a lactation industry that makes lots of money off pushing breastfeeding. Sometimes they do very unethical things, like let a baby starve to death, in their zeal to push breastfeeding only. You asked how people make money off breastfeeding women, and I (along with many others) told you. No one said formula feeding was free, because it isn’t. However, neither is breastfeeding, and an honest comparison of the costs is required even from a purely monetary point of view.

Are you trying to move goalposts here? I think you are, but if so, you’re very bad at it.

Are you now going to say you never have needed food? You were just saying that the things the breastfeeding industry sells are not necessary – and then went ahead and compared them to the most necessary thing one could think of.

Drop in breast feeding support group (led by a lactation consultant) is $10 per visit
Even if you want to make your own “milky cookies ” or whatever they are called, ingredients cost money and brewers yeast is expensive if you have to visit a speciality store to buy it
Milk storage bags if you pump
The specialty round hot/cold gel packs with special cut out for soothing breasts that are engorged or sore nipples

sabelmouse

i never had/used any of this.

Charybdis

Congratulations to you! Do you think that just because *you* never needed to use any of those things that other people don’t need/want/are pushed into doing so?

sabelmouse

i was pushed as much or little as anybody. just didn’t buy into it.

Roadstergal

Well, bless your heart.

Azuran

ah, so your experience is the only possible experience? what a privileged asshole you are.

sabelmouse

did i say that?

The Bofa on the Sofa

Why else would your response to “what are they selling” be “I didn’t need any of that”?

Besides, regardless of whether YOU needed it, do you deny that these things are being sold?

If not, what is your point?

Roadstergal

Her point? Gish gallop.

sabelmouse

see my other comment.

FallsAngel

Oh, c’mon! I’m about as conventional as they come. The only things on that list I used were tea and cookies, not special by ones, either.

Roadstergal

This subthread wasn’t about whether you, or sabelmouse, or anyone else personally used these things. Sabelmouse asked what the breastfeeding industry sells in general, and folk with experience answered.

It’s like shoes – I could say truthfully that I spend ridiculously small amounts on shoes, just like you for bras downthread, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a market out there for very expensive and specialized footwear, and an industry that profits off of it.

Or like motorcycle gear – someone else could say that they didn’t have to buy half of the stuff that I did, and certainly not spend as much. But the existence of the industry, and the fact that they sell these things, and make good money doing so, is not in question. And that’s what sabelmouse was questioning initially, not whether you or her specifically needed to use it.

The question of the cheapest route is going to vary widely between women and between families, depending on chance and circumstance, and there’s no one set answer. But to say there isn’t money to be made by industries no matter what route you go – as sabelmouse was implying re: breastfeeding – isn’t accurate.

LibrarianSarah

I have never bought tampons so obviously tampons on not necessary and women are wasting their money on them. /s

FallsAngel

I think this is the first time I’ve ever agreed with sabelmouse, and it will probably be the last. I think calling breastfeeding an “industry” is hyperbole. I think Dr. Kitty’s “list” is hyperbole, and was intended to be so.

Here is a list which shows that virtually nothing is totally necessary. She actually left off “make your own” for the nursing cover. I made a few for shower gifts for new moms recently. They didn’t have those when I breast fed, most recently 29 years ago. We (the baby and I) managed.http://kellymom.com/pregnancy/bf-prep/breastfeeding-supplies2/

Roadstergal

I know you managed without spending tons, and I know it’s theoretically possible to manage without spending tons. I was just trying to explain the reaction you were getting, which is because a: others have not found it so easy or convenient to manage without shelling out a fair bit, and b: regardless of what anyone really needs, there’s an industry out there selling a lot of stuff, really, in reality, regardless of need – it’s being sold. I live in an area where crunchiness and affluence often intersect, and you will not go broke here selling breastfeeding paraphernalia.

And of course, the biggest part, c: if formula weren’t demonized, women who were struggling with breastfeeding and throwing money at it when it was painful/not making milk/inconvenient/interfering with life/etc would not feel that they really needed to throw their money at many of these products, and could instead find the best place for them on the formula/combo feed/supplement spectrum.

FallsAngel

There are always hucksters out there trying to make money off naive people, and/or people who just have too much money. I’m pointing out many of these purchases are totally unnecessary. In another link I posted, a woman wrote about breastfeeding stuff she never even used. Moral of the story? Go easy on the supplies at first.

I also live in such an area as you, and you will also not go broke here selling cutesy handmade soaps (they frequently pop up at festivals), and all sorts of other totally useless junk. Caveat Emptor!

Roadstergal

Exactly! We can say that there is not generally a need for expensive soap – but would we try to say that there’s no industry around soap? No specialized soaps? No big industries doing heavy groundwork to get people to pay more money for soap? *coughDovecough* Nobody trying to convince you that a particular pricier soap is better than the rest or that a lesser soap can cause you or your lovely babies harm?

And some people do indeed need specialized soaps for various reasons.

And some soap sellers try to fearmonger you into getting their soap.

Calling them out is worthwhile.

That’s what we’re more or less getting at.

Amazed

Your pointing the unnecessary nature of many breastfeeding purchases doesn’t make the industry selling them not an industry. Breastfeeding isn’t an industry by itself but there is an industry created around it. The same is true about formula.

In fact, many of the industries sell mostly things people don’t actually need but enjoy or use to make life easier. I don’t actually need books to live, yet I am happy to pour money into the book-selling industry.

Amazed

But calling formula feeding an “industry” isn’t hyperbole? You came here to support breastfeeding as the pure, cheap choice and left sabelmouse’s ugly hint that a loss mother is lying about her baby’s death unchallenged? Oh, and BTW, she all but says that the only reason for insufficient supply is a starving mother. You didn’t say anything on that either.

Look, what you’re doing here is making everything about you. “I didn’t need/use use is” is no way to argue. If women didn’t use something, it wouldn’t be on the market, it’s this simple. 29 years ago you didn’t have internet to point at an antivaxxer as the voice of wisdom either. You managed.

Do you not understand that an industry isn’t addressed at what people need but what they want? And the difference here is, with formula feeding a woman has no other choice but place her money into the industry because her baby needs to be fed. With breastfeeding, it’s different because, strictly said, some/many women don’t need this or that, so they might refrain from using it. Even kellymom says “convenient for some but not necessary”. She basically denigrated the comfort of the mother and you cheered her on. Do you truly think that what isn’t strictly necessary for breastfeeding to happen is always unneeded?

You and sabelmouse seem to both conflate the word “industry” with something big and bad, so you’re happy to lay this sin at the formula feeding door. But should anyone dare hint that breastfeeding also tries to sell you something, no matter if you need it, you’re all insulted.

Your attitude to this blog is very telling. You think us ani-vaginal and anti-breastfeeding because we don’t pray at the altar of breastfeeding and vaginal. The world isn’t this black and white, you know.

FallsAngel

Excuse me? ” You came here to support breastfeeding as the pure, cheap choice and
left sabelmouse’s ugly hint that a loss mother is lying about her baby’s
death unchallenged? Oh, and BTW, she all but says that the only reason
for insufficient supply is a starving mother. You didn’t say anything on
that either.”

I did? You know this how? I agreed on one small part of what sabelmouse said, none other.

Rant on, rant on!

Amazed

How do I know? By your choice of the small part, nothing else. It clearly showed what you consider most important. And what wasn’t important enough to merit a word.

Keep moaning about us anti-vaginal and breastfeeding, though, do not let me stop your protective mission!

FallsAngel

So you’re all knowing! I freaking said I didn’t see the other comments. I suppose you think I’m lying!

God, you guys like to gang up on people who don’t toe the line, don’t you? First it was Kathy, now me!

Amazed

By their company you shall know them. I didn’t remember you from before but I do remember the Kathy piece. The sick mind who thought about Dr Tuteur’s death along with the other piece, Tara Haelle, right?

Oh, and ganging up on you? People have been perfectly polite to you. I am the only one who was rude. You compare me to the perfectly nice Azuran and Roadstergal, and Dr Kitty who just disagree with you? What did you think would happen when you came to an anti-vaginal, anti-breastfeeding and whatnot site and started posting things that differ from the perceptions of most posters? That they would shut up? What?

FallsAngel

Kathy happens to be one of the pro-vaccine people who is on a lot of vaccine boards. We generally agree about vaccines. I did not agree about that Tara Haelle piece and said as much.

I don’t care who and what Kathy is. I am not interested in her this much. I judge her by what she showed here and it didn’t make her look good. Since you’ve been lurking here, you’d know that she only parachuted in here to claim proud ownership of her facebook words? What did you expect we would think about her when we only had this one appearance to judge her for? Or did you expect we’d be all good and nice to her because YOU knew her from other sites?

Perfectly polite, yes. Your posts were all about you and the others told you this much nicely than I did. And if you are unable to make distinction between “true confessions” (why the quotation marks, BTW? You think they aren’t true confessions?) and answering every point someone made when asked about what an industry sells with, “Well, for ME” it wasn’t necessary!”, I guess you won’t see it if I tried to explain it to you.

Are you trying to be smart by pretending that I admitted this is an “anti” site, or is it just the limit of your intelligence?

Mike Stevens

“What did you think would happen when you came to an anti-vaginal, anti-breastfeeding and whatnot site”

Is that what this site is? “Anti-breastfeeding”?
I am sorely mistaken then, I thought it was a rational, evidence-based blog which used scientific facts to argue against the lactivist extreme view that only breast will do, and that all else is an unnatural poison.

Amazed

It is. However, I chose to use FallsAngel’s perception that this is an anti-site. She seems to believe that the fact not everyone here is rah-rah about breastfeeding and vaginal birth despite a good deal of posters having had both and enjoyed both means it’s an anti-site. And my question still stands. When I perceive something to be hostile to my own ideas, I don’t go there to preach and then moan, “What a hateful forum!” BTW, she said this to my posts and the perfectly nice Dr Kitty’s. She doesn’t seem to distinguish between the two. Weird.

The Bofa on the Sofa

. She seems to believe that the fact not everyone here is rah-rah about breastfeeding and vaginal birth despite a good deal of posters having had both

For pete’s sake, Amy Tuteur herself has actually had both!!!!

FallsAngel

Yes, Mike, I have come to see this is an anti-vaginal delivery/anti-breastfeeding site.

Anyone who just perused this site would be tempted to think that no one ever had an uncomplicated vaginal delivery. When I once said I had had such a delivery, I was told “it’s not all about you”, followed by a lengthy description of that person’s vaginal delivery that was such a horror it ruined her sex life for some time. But that wasn’t “all about her”.

As far as the breast feeding, no one on this site believes it’s possible to successfully breast feed a baby, either. Again, if you say you did so successfully (me now, not you, of course!) it’s “all about you”. The other billions of women on earth can’t/couldn’t. I do feel rather amazed that I was able to do something no one else (including my own Mom, so I knew everyone isn’t successful) ever could. And yes, my kids did have an occasional bottle of formula, which I posted here. But that means I’m not welcome by the lactivists, either.

And yes, the way they treated Kathy was awful, even if I didn’t agree with Kathy on that issue.

Azuran

No one believe it’s possible to successfully breastfeed? Then how is it that I am currently exclusively breastfeeding a baby?
And no, no one is going to come over and tell me that it’s ‘not about me’ because I’m not trying to project my experience on other women.

I had an absolutely horrible failed vaginal birth that ended in an emergency c-section. BUT, thanks to Dr Amy and this site, I was fully informed of basically everything that could go wrong. I knew what what going on. And despite this failed birth being the worst experience of my life, I have no trauma about it and no guilt or feeling of failure. Because I was informed.
That really all blog is about. Breastfeeding and birth aren’t perfect. And it’s important to be able to talk about those imperfection.

FallsAngel

All I will say to that is that I never tried to project my experience on to other women either. That and I DO find this site very anti-vaginal delivery and BF.

Azuran

sad that you think giving proper information to people and giving them the knowledge to make informed decision about their care is being anti something.

FallsAngel

Awww, “sad”. I’m fed up with your insults, Azuran! I didn’t say that and you freaking know it.

Azuran

What insult? Disagreeing with your view is not an insult.
This site provides science based information about the actual risks and benefits of various childbirth and feeding method.
You claim it is anti breastfeeding and vaginal birth
Hence, in your mind, giving proper info is synonymous with being ‘anti’
Nowhere have I called you any kind of name or insulted you.

FallsAngel

The hell, Azuran. You just said I’m “sad”.

Azuran

I didn’t say what YOU are sad (which even if I did, isn’t even an insult)
I said that the situation was sad

FallsAngel

Yes, the situation was “sad” because I’m so closed minded, or whatever. Sad to be me. A little micro-agression. One you’ve used before on me. And now, roadstergal just called me a “shit-stirrer”.

You guys all have a nice day over there.

Azuran

You are being way oversensitive here. There wasn’t any micro-aggression, and I haven’t used micro-aggression before.
And well, you are running around everywhere on the blog complaining that everyone is against you and crying wolf about imagined insults. So yea, some people are going to get fed up with you about it. It’s their right.

FallsAngel

“Amazed” said it’s an anti-breastfeeding/anti-vaginal birth site.

Azuran

I highly doubt it, but if you can post a screen shot of the comment where she said that I’ll gladly look at it.

She said it sarcastically, in a sub-thread above where Bofa noted that not being rah-rah cheerleaders of VB and BF in all circumstances for all women makes us anti-VB and anti-BF in FA’s mind.

Roadstergal

She was being tongue-in-cheek, as per Bofa above.

I can’t tell if you’re not good at reading comprehension, or if you’re just out to stir shit. If the former, take a deep breath and consider that you might not have understood fully what was being communicated before pounding the keyboard in response. If the latter, consider not doing that, it’s not a fun way to go through life.

*blink* My sister had an uncomplicated vaginal delivery and no problems breastfeeding. She’s back at work now and pumps for her son. We all know lots of people who’ve had uncomplicated ‘natural’ births and breastfeeding, including some of the regular posters.

The problem comes in when people argue that because it’s possible for some people, it’s possible for all people if they just ate better / exercised more / had positive thoughts. I know that isn’t your argument! You’ve never come close to saying anything like that. But you did have the misfortune to come into a very emotionally charged thread about a baby’s death and talk about how breastfeeding worked for you, which came across as insensitive.

FallsAngel

I didn’t talk about how breast feeding worked for me when I was being flamed the other day. I talked about nursing bras! BRAS! Bras and breast feeding equipment. I’m goddam sick of being told I’m “insensitive”, “sad” (as in a sorry excuse for a person), “not understanding low income people”, etc, etc, etc, etc, and ETC by the people on this forum.

Oh, the bras. Yeah, I recall that conversation. I believe someone posted about how expensive her nursing bras were, you expressed disbelief, and the numbers were broken down for you (and there were some unpleasant words tossed your way too). That set the stage for people to read everything you’ve said in the worst way possible.
I’m sorry this experience has been bad. I hope you stick around anyways, because people really are generally nice and supportive. It always sucks to be the anomaly, though!

FallsAngel

Well you believe wrong. And I, trying to be HELPFUL to a breast feeding mom, instead of saying, “forget breast feeding, go buy some formula” posted some links to INEXPENSIVE nursing bras. But hey, I’m a shit on this forum. You have a nice day there.

Azuran

If your intention was to direct her to some places where she could find cheaper nursing bras. You might have wanted to phrase it like ‘Have you checked out wall-mart? Maybe they have cheaper options’
Instead of just saying: They cost 11$ at wall-mart (which, despite it not being you intention, can totally be interpreted as you meaning that her buying more expensive bras was stupid and a waste)

I’m trying to help you here, I’m even acknowledging that your comment wasn’t meant to be hurtful.
It is extremely common to have written comments be interpreted with the wrong meaning due to lack of spoken intonation. Therefore, it is important to be as clear as possible when writing.
The biggest problem here is that you didn’t take into consideration the tone of the thread before commenting. It wasn’t a lovely discussion about where everyone got their bras and where to get the best deal.
The discussion tread was sabelmouse being an ass and denying the existence of the breastfeeding industry. Which led to people posting what they had to buy while they were breastfeeding. Hence the post about spending 120$ on nursing bras.
People in this discussion were mostly already annoyed. And you barged in with an ambiguous and tone deaf comment.

FallsAngel

” And you barged in with an ambiguous and tone deaf comment.”

More, more, more, please!

Azuran

Man you sure love playing the victim and seeing everything as an insult. Your comment was indeed ambiguous and tone deaf, which resulted in people misinterpreting it’s meaning. It’s not an insult nor does it make you a bad person or really means anything about you, your intentions or your personality. it’s just a mistake, it happened to everyone who writes in blog and forum, including everyone here at some point. including me. Just be an adult, accept it and move on.

Azuran

Seriously, go get some air, seems like you need it.

maidmarian555

FWIW I didn’t think you were trying to be anything other than helpful when responding to my original comment about bras. I’m sorry it all kind of went off on a tangent. I’m also sorry if any of my responses were abrupt or rude, that certainly wasn’t my intention.

FallsAngel

No, you are one of the few who was not rude. Thank you. I WAS trying to be helpful.

The Bofa on the Sofa

I thought it was a rational, evidence-based blog which used scientific facts to argue against the lactivist extreme “Breastapo” view that only breast will do, and that all else is an unnatural poison.

We also fail to worship at the Altar of the Unmedicated Natural Birth and fail to demonize c-sections.

That makes us anti-vaginal birth, apparently.

shay simmons

“Breastapo.” Clever. Did you come up with that?

Mike Stevens

Fraid not. I think it may just be used this side of the pond.

The Bofa on the Sofa

I’ve heard it hear, along with “Boob Nazis”

Amazed

Why would I think you’re lying? I often don’t see all comments either. Actually, I rarely read each and every comment, especially on big threads.

However, you’ve now had the chance to see her other comments, including the one denying that (lack of) breastfeeding killed baby Landon. You still haven’t found it important enough to mention while still defending sainted breastfeeding.

Figures.

FallsAngel

I STILL haven’t read those comments. I don’t care to. On the vaccine forums, sabel’s a fruitcake! That’s not what I was talking about, I was talking about freaking nursing bras! And goddam it, I didn’t say anything “saintly” about breastfeeding, or even “defend” it. I just said nursing bras came in all sizes and prices. You can’t tell me these threads never go off track. I’ve lurked here and actually posted on some of the SOB vaccine threads.

Amazed

I am not saying the threads never go off track. They obviously do. Yet without caring to read sabelmouse’s other comments, you claim we’re all attacking her? Without caring to know what might have angered us before proclaiming her the victim? On the other hand, you read Kathy’s comments. You even agreed her stance was a wrong one, her dismissal of an 1,5 additional death in 1000 not the way to go. You still think we were the bad guys to poor Kathy. I guess it won’t matter even if you read sabelmouse’s comments.

FallsAngel

“Yet without caring to read sabelmouse’s other comments, you claim we’re all attacking her?”

I shouldn’t have to post the following but, you seem to have a reading comprehension problem so I will point out I never said you all are attacking sabelmouse. I said I agreed with her on one point.

“Outdated personal experience”. Good grief, I have lurked on this forum enough to have read about everyone’s horrible, terrible, totally devastating vaginal births and the negative effect on their sex lives, etc, but I post some personal experience and it’s wrong? And has breastfeeding changed in the past 29 years? Could have fooled me! Where did I say anything was “not really needed and only promoted by hippies”? Please quote.

I posted several quotes from mainstream (not “hippie”) sources talking about accessories one might need and advising not to spend too much money on things until you know what you need/want.

And what’s with this “us” stuff at the beginning of this post? I have come to realize this is a little clique of posters, moreso than any other forum on Disqus. Just yesterday I read a comment about some “parachuter”, meaning some other outsider who dared to come here to post something. You guys can take your little cabal and have at it. The next time I see a topic that seems interesting, I will remind myself of this bad experience, and others I’ve had here and stay away. I’m sure it will make you (plural) healthy.

Mike Stevens

I can pretty much confirm that Falls angel and Sabelmouse are as far apart ideologically as is possible to get. Don’t conflate the thinking of them both, simply because Falls said she had a rare moment of minor agreement with Sabel about something.

Amazed

Thank you. Yes, Falls angel has said that she disagrees with sabelmouse on pretty much everything and I see no reason to think this isn’t so. I mean the behavior Falls angel shows at this site. Here, she sides with positions that dodge and avoid placing any blame on the aggressive promotion on breastfeeding when it leads to tragedy. As to her perception that Kathy was the victim here, I simply have no words.

Sorry, Mike. Here, sabelmouse is not a victim and Kathy is even less so. Falls angel chose to side with them. It’s her comments here that I judge her by, not her general stance on things.

Heidi

I agree with her stances on vaccines but I noticed she was what we call here a “shit stirrer” for the sake of being a shit stirrer. I don’t even think she probably feels that passionately about breastfeeding or vaginal birth but she wanted to stir some shit.

myrewyn

Going with “shit stirrer” instead of “really bad at reading comprehension” is easier for now. It makes it less tempting to reply to her comments.

Roadstergal

I’ll have to consider that.

Heidi

I have to think shit stirrer. When someone brought up the fact that you would have to forfeit her wages to pump, her response wasn’t simply, “Oh, I once knew a doctor who was fortunate enough to only have to pump once with twins,” but instead it was all, “Why would you have to pump more than once?! I knew a doctor who only had to pump once for twins!” But she acts as though her responses to people are like the first one instead and that everyone is so mean to her. She frequently responds in antagonistic ways versus just sharing her experiences and surely she can see that?

Roadstergal

Yeah, and down below, when Azuran said it’s a sad state of affairs that she thinks telling the reality of breastfeeding and vaginal birth (can be great, but can be horrible and not always possible) is anti-BF and anti-VB. And her response was, “You called me sad! All you can do is insult!”

That is either ‘_really_ bad at reading comprehension’ or ‘shit stirrer.’

FallsAngel

Thank you, Mike! Upvote X 10 if I could.

Azuran

‘necessity’ isn’t what makes an industry.
Tabacco is one of the biggest industry and that’s the least needed product out there.
There are people who make, sell and make a profit selling all sort of products to help breastfeeding. Hence, there is an industry that exist around breastfeeding.
It doesn’t matter that you managed to live without it. It’s still and industry and it exist. And really, what’s wrong with buying things you don’t ‘need’ if they make your life easier?

FallsAngel

Well, we’re getting way off topic here. Dr. Kitty was talking about special foods for bf, which any credible source will tell you is bunk; homeopathy, ditto; she mentioned some drug I’d never heard of which I just looked up and found not approved for any use in the US; breastfeeding “art”, which I have no idea what she’s talking about; and selling breastmilk, which yes, I’ve heard of, but reputable milk banks use volunteers.

Roadstergal

It’s bunk, but it’s sold and it’s making money. That’s the entirety of the point. The ‘alternative medicine’ industry is nothing but bunk, and it’s big business.

FallsAngel

On that, I have posted many times.

Azuran

It’s bunk, but it’s still being sold and recommended by lactation consultant, hence it’s part of the breastfeeding industry.
Indeed homeopathy is worthless, but it’s still a very large industry.
And we aren’t getting off topic. if you go back, the first comment of this trend was Sabelmouse denying the existence of a breastfeeding industry. We have simply been giving example of things that are part of this industry.

FallsAngel

“Simply” while insulting me.

Azuran

When have I insulted you?

FallsAngel

OK, you didn’t, but your compatriots sure did! As one of them said “By their company you shall know them.”

Azuran

Oh, forgot to add:
-Vitamins I have to take while breastfeeding
-Vitamin D for the baby

sabelmouse

you had to?

Heidi_storage

Vitamin D for the baby is optional, if you don’t mind risking rickets or other problems.

Babies who are exclusively breastfed will usually not get sufficient vitamin D.

The only children under 4 who *don’t* need vitamin D supplements are ones taking more than 500ml of formula every day, because formula is fortified with vitamin D.

Not only are breastfeeding women advised to take vitamin D, so are their babies.

The last case of rickets I saw was in a breastfed child of Indian vegans.

sabelmouse

vegans!

Mike Stevens

“Vegans!”
Complete nutters, hey? Literally.

MaineJen

Yeah, heh, silly vegans, wanting to be healthy and all. Not wanting to harm animals. What a crazy idea.

Being antivaccine, on the other hand…that’s perfectly rational.

Dr Kitty

I have no objection to veganism.
It can be a healthy life choice provided it is done sensibly, which to my mind means taking vitamin B12, iron, calcium and vitamin D supplements or ensuring through regular blood tests that you are not deficient.

Rickets is a foreseeable complication for dark skinned vegans in Ireland who exclusively breastfeed, have known vitamin D deficiency and and don’t take vitamin D supplements even when advised to do so.

Amazed

Talking of rickets, my medical files document that I had the early symptoms of it when I was about a year old, take a few months in or out. I was exclusively breastfed and gaining sufficiently, meeting milestones in time or earlier. I simply lived in a dark and damp house. My parents moved out, symptoms went out the window.

If breastfeeding was so magical, surely it should have protected me? I was not living in poverty. My mom was well-nourished and actually produced quite sufficiently. But it didn’t. It’s almost as if breastfeeding has its militations, right?

Heidi_storage

I was making a sarcastic remark, along the lines of “You don’t need to floss your teeth, just the ones you want to keep.” People have been listing all of the accoutrements and services that breastfeeding women spend money upon, and your response has been “I never bought that, I never needed that.” Vitamin D is a product that you really should be buying your breastfed baby, however, unless you want to risk giving your baby sunburn and skin cancer by cooking him in the sun.

(Taking a prenatal vitamin for yourself is generally recommended as well to ensure that the breastfeeding mother doesn’t become deficient in various nutrients, by the way.)

sabelmouse

poor disqus can’t even cope with the many replies that i am getting.
mine were fine without vit d and didn’t get sunburned.
but i did nourish myself sensibly.
maybe we h blame people for selling food to breastfeeding women.
down with that, it impedes formula sales!

Heidi_storage

I think my sarcastic remark was funnier. I’m glad your kids were okay. But guess what? You can “nourish yourself sensibly” and still have a kid with vitamin D deficiencies. Kind of a risk, there.

sabelmouse

life is a risk.
you can reduce that somewhat by being sensible.

Amazed

YOU can’t since you’re a guillible, helpless victim of natural propaganda and your own inflated ego.

sabelmouse

awe!

mamajb

You will find that you are wasting your time with this group. If you haven’t realized it yet.

sabelmouse

oh yeah, i have. ages ago. every once in a while i go there because of someone i follow and regret.
then again, if you don’t take them seriously, and who can, it can be somewhat amusing.

mamajb

I think it is sad – and a little scary, that so many (including the “doctor” are so ill informed. And the seemingly seething anger is something else indeed.

It’s optimal (since breastmilk isn’t perfect)
I live in a northern country. Spring hasn’t even reached us yet. we has 2 inches of snow yesterday, and there is still 2 feet of snow on the ground.
Vitamin D deficiency is basically the standard where I live.

sabelmouse

i take vit d even when not breastfeeding. living in ireland.
of course vit d rich foods are also a good idea.
good nutrition is generally.

Heidi_storage

You know, “industry” is not a bad word. Making money selling breastfeeding aids, accessories, and advice is not immoral in itself, so why pretend that it is not an industry? It is only objectionable when the people selling you stuff behave unethically–that is, lie, omit information, make detrimental recommendations, or otherwise advertise inappropriately. But it is dishonest to present “the formula industry” on one hand and “[altruistic] breastfeeding advocates” on the other without noting that both methods of feeding are associated with products and services.

Diet dee

Really don’t understand this anti breastfeeding agrresion.

myrewyn

So I guess you have missed the part where many of us, including Dr Tuteur, have breastfed our own children. We are anti starving your newborn, or anti shaming moms, but not anti breastfeeding.

The Bofa on the Sofa

Perhaps it is because babies are being harmed because of the insistence of overstating the benefits of breasteeding? This provides some grounding in reality.

Why shouldn’t we aggressively fight things that harm babies?

Azuran

Oh look who’s back
A baby is dead you idiot, because lactation consultant refuses to admit that there are risks to breastfeeding.
We aren’t anti-breastfeeding (ffs there is a baby attached to my breast as I am writing this) We are simply demanding that mothers be properly told about the risks, how to recognize when things aren’t working, and what to do to make sure their babies are safe.

sabelmouse

it interferes with money making.

Azuran

Yea, the money making of lactation consultant.
No one here is making any money on other people’s decision to either breastfeed or formula feed.

sabelmouse

are you forced to use those?

Azuran

-I needed to pump to increase my supply.
-I had lesions on my nipple for the first few days
-I do have to give vitamin D to my baby.
-I guess I don’t NEED to use nursing pads, I could just leak milk in all my clothes and everywhere all the time.

Really, I actually had a very easy time breastfeeding. But since I don’t have my head up my ass like you do, I understand that my own experience is not an indication of anyone else’s experience. Other people will need way more stuff than I did.

Charybdis

Well, the baby must be fed, or the authorities have to get involved. You know, child neglect and all that. So if breastfeeding is not working for you, then you must formula feed. And please, give the “use donor milk from a milk bank” or “just milk share with other local mamas” a rest. Screened donor milk should rightfully go to preemies who need it (NEC and all) and informal milk sharing is ludicrous. Biohazardous bodily fluid and all.
So yes, if you want desperately to breastfeed because of all the inflated hype around it and are having trouble, you will fork over $$$ to lactation consultants to help and advise you, more $$$ for supplements/teas/lactation cookies, SNS, medications (domperidone, anyone?), nursing pads, pillows, gel packs, pumps, milk storage bags, all in an effort to pursue EBF. If you don’t breastfeed, then you must use formula.
So yeah, you kind of are “forced” to use those things.

Roadstergal

You know, women wouldn’t feel forced to use those if the benefits of early formula supplementation while supply is being built were more widely known, or if combo feeding were more widely taught.

It’s almost as if the demonization of formula is critical for this breastfeeding industry to keep making money. And we’re back around to the original intent of the post. 🙂

That’s because there is no anti-breastfeeding aggression to understand. It doesn’t exist.

Breastfeeding isn’t perfect. Sometimes the milk is nutrient deficient, and sometimes there isn’t enough of it. Also, some women don’t want to breastfeed. All women, regardless of how they feed their babies, must be supported. All women should be informed of what failure to thrive looks like, too, so no babies die of dehydration because their moms don’t know that breastfeeding doesn’t always work.

Diet dee

Second subheading states breastfeeding does kill. Amy is a bit much sometimes.

moto_librarian

Because it does, asshole.

Azuran

It killed Landon Johnson.
And that’s without counting all the babies it land in NICU for dehydratation and hypoglycemia.

Dr Kitty

Breastfeeding does kill.
Babies in Sudan and Eritrea and Yemen and North Korea are dying TODAY because breastfeeding is insufficient to supply their needs and they have no access to formula.

Or is that not what you meant?

Diet dee

Isn’t more intellectually honest to say starvation or malnutrition is the real culprit.

Dr Kitty

Right, but in the circumstances on which maternal caloric intake is inadequate breast IS NOT BEST.

These babies are dying because their mothers don’t have enough food and they don’t have access to formula.
Clearly, in a situation where maternal caloric intake is inadequate. breast is not best.

Breastfeeding is not a panacea.
It is not the best option for every baby in every situation.
Sometimes formula and a kettle of boiled water is better.

Until you can admit that, your intellectual dishonesty and ideology is obvious.

Diet dee

When my wife could produce enough milk we use formula or rice milk. I really don’t have dog in this fight.

Azuran

Then why did you felt the need to comment here and dismiss the preventable death of a baby?

Dr Kitty

Ok…
So exclusive BF will kill some babies who could be saved by FF.

Breastfeeding does kill some babies.
Now these may not be *Anerican* or * European* babies, but if I were you, quibbling about that makes you look like a racist poor loser.
Not really “a bit much” is it?

You can look at things from a place of privelege if it makes you feel better. You opted for formula when it suited you to do so. When women who cannot access formula and do not produce enough breastmilk have to feed their babies, their babies die.

You are disgusting.
You use formula when it suits you, but feel superior somehow to women who need formula because of malnutrition.

Here’s the rub: when water is safe, formula is properly prepared and parents are present the benefits of BF are LOWER.
3 IQ points is the difference between a single or double espresso the morning of the test.
When you aren’t making breastmilk and your baby is dying in front of you, then any kind of formula is lifesaving.

sabelmouse

or feed the mother, safe the baby!

fiftyfifty1

Yes, if a breastfed baby’s mother is starving and that’s the reason she can’t produce milk, feeding the mother large amounts may allow her to improve lactogenesis in time to save the baby. But of course maternal malnutrition is one of just many reasons that milk production can fail. Baby Landon’s mother wasn’t starving.

sabelmouse

then why so many comments about starving mothers?

moto_librarian

Probably because you assholes keep bringing up women in the developing world.

sabelmouse

awe, i’d forgotten the lovely level of discourse on the raptors.

fiftyfifty1

Ask diet dee. She’s the one who shifted the topic to maternal starvation.

What information would satisfy you? Because we have a complete timeline of events, full autopsy report, and full medical report all showing the same thing. What, exactly, is “fishy” and what evidence would satisfy you that the straightforward tragedy here presented is, in fact, exactly what happened?

sabelmouse

really, where?
links that don’t work?
timeline is very short.
baby most likely died from something birth related.

Nono, you don’t get to ignore my questions. What evidence do you, personally, want to see that you will find convincing?

kilda

something that says what she wants it to say, of course.

moto_librarian

Sweet cheeks, even in the developed world, women can and do suffer insufficient supply and primary lactation failure. I’m certainly well-fed and healthy. My milk never came in with either birth. I never experienced the sensation of let-down or engorgement, and I was pumping and putting baby to the breast regularly. It’s amazing that not a single lactivist seems interested in determining what the actual rate of primary lactation failure actually is – I guess it’s easier just pretending that it’s “exceedingly rare” and that it’s a woman’s fault if she can’t breastfeed.

sabelmouse

so you’re just salty?!

Heidi_storage

Yeah, it really annoys me when they talk about AIDS killing someone; we all know that Kaposi’s sarcoma and other opportunistic infections are the real culprits.

Roadstergal

The Diet Dee school of epidemiology. Automobile accidents have never killed anyone. If they happen to die of exsanguination afterwards, that’s just coincidence.

Diet dee

Amy is comparing starving 3rd world moms( where breast milk is likely the only option) to 1st world moms who can breast feed or formula feed. It’s weak logic to compare the two groups.

Azuran

No that’s not what she’s doing. She’s fighting against lactivits, who push breastfeeding at all cost, refuse to acknowledge the possibility of breastfeeding failure and lie to women, which has resulted in the preventable death of babies.

Roadstergal

The lactivists say that breastfeeding saves lives. She is merely pointing to a few potent counterexamples. In the absence of formula – whether because it’s unavailable, or because it’s demonized – exclusive breastfeeding can indeed kill.

myrewyn

That’s not what this is about at all! Did you not get the part about Landon’s short life in this first world country??

Not when you have breastfeeding advocacy groups saying shit like this:

Concerns/inappropriate reasons: Mother is too malnourished or sick to breastfeed or eats an inappropriate diet.
Responses: Even malnourished mothers can breastfeed. Breast milk quality and quantity is only affected in extreme circumstances. Supplements are better given to the mother (with continued breastfeeding) than the infant.
Risks of supplementation: Risk of decreasing breastfeeding duration or exclusivity.

Yeah, by their own logic, “decreasing breastfeeding” can’t be the problem in itself, they HAVE to identify what decreasing breastfeeding actually does. But it doesn’t really do much. So… how is that a “risk”. Ugh.

Nick Sanders

I disagree. The chart of “insufficient reasons” for not breastfeeding exclusively made it pretty clear to me that the act of breastfeeding itself was the goal. Not anything it did for the child, nor anything it did for the mother, because it was pretty clear that even when shit was going south for one or both, that they were to shut up and keep breastfeeding. Breastfeeding for breastfeeding’s sake, and if you use any formula at all, you’re doing it wrong.

Roadstergal

It’s religious. Breast milk is pure and formula is impure. Formula, in that context, is literally worse than death. Breast milk unto death is preferable. If ‘rare.’ :p

No. You and your ilk are trying like hell for breastfeeding to be a utopia and absolutely refuse recognize that it fraught with problems and that babies can and do die because they are breastfed to the exclusion of any supplementation at all. Because you stomp your feet and say that supplementation is NEVER necessary.
You and your ilk are even having a deleterious effect on what is considered normal. 10%+ weight loss in a newborn? That’s normal. Brick dust in a diaper? Totally normal, all babies do that. Telling a mother that her constantly nursing, upset, crying/screaming baby is normal “It’s second night syndrome” has become SOP. “Your baby doesn’t need more that a couple of milliliters of feeding at a time until your milk comes in, they can’t be hungry.” has become par for the course. Jaundice? Pshaw! That’s totes normal for a baby. Hypoglycemia and hypernatremia? Normal, normal, normal.
When a list of “things to watch out for as they indicate a problem” have somehow become “normal”, then there is no way for anyone to recognize issues early enough to head them off before they become critical or deadly. Or if someone recognizes it as an issue, they are immediately shouted down and labeled as “fearmongers” or “not understanding how lactation works and how newborns eat” or called a “formula shill” and that they MUST be getting a kickback from the formula companies. Breastfeeding has NEVER been perfect and there have been ways to supplement a baby since forever.

It can and does (very, very rarely). Landon died due to breastfeeding- no one bothered to let the parents know that the baby was dying until it was too late to fix it, and that is 100% due to breastfeeding promotion.

There is also the case of the baby who died in France of malnutrition because her vegan mother’s milk was just that devoid of nutrients.

So yes, there’s some shock factor in the headings, but there’s also truth. Breastfeeding, if it fails to work, can kill babies.

It’s just that you don’t seem to understand that anyone who isn’t 100% BF isn’t necessarily anti BF.

Diet dee

hey just look at the heat i’m taking for posing this question!! But mostly im Talking about AMY! But im getting attacked like a sane person on INFOWARS.com

Azuran

You accused us of ‘anti-breastfeeding aggression’. So YOU actually came in with false accusation right off the bat (on a post about a dead baby) AND you have a history of just parachuting here repeatedly to throw shit a everyone and you wonder why we aren’t all cuddly bunny with you?

sabelmouse

always like that on the pseudo skepticals.
i feel a banning coming on.

Empress of the Iguana People

You two have been popping in off and on for ages. Dr T doesn’t ban often.

Diet dee: “hey just look at the heat i’m taking for posing this question!!”

One polite response and a question posed in said-same at the outset.. qualifies as “heat” to you?

… …

Diet dee: “But mostly im Talking about AMY!”

And therein.. lies the rub.

shay simmons

Since when is disagreement “heat?”

Diet dee

I’m surprised at the number of quick and intense responses.

shay simmons

One?

Proponent

Serious question..

Did you read the article in it’s entirety?

I did.

And I did not note any “agrresion”.

FallsAngel

In fairness, saying “Breastfeeding does kill” is pretty “aggressive”.

Charybdis

How would you have put it?

FallsAngel

I don’t think I could do it in a little sound-bite like that. I try to stay off this board, it’s too anti-breastfeeding and vaginal birth for me.

Proponent

In the context of that one section of this article.. it does set up the points that are subsequently made.

Semantics, literary license.. six of one, half dozen of another.

And I didn’t have a problem with the author doing so, and reiterating, did not find it to be aggressive.

Heidi_storage

No “anti breastfeeding agrresion (sic)” here. The commenters on this site think that breastfeeding is just dandy, when it works for the mother and child. What we don’t like is the exaggeration of breastfeeding benefits, the minimization of breastfeeding risks and downsides, and the demonization of formula.

(N.B. I am writing this comment with a baby glued to my breast, as is the case with most of my comments. Other commenters breastfeed, formula feed, and combo feed, because ALL of those options are good ways to feed a baby.)

Azuran

Hey, we should start a ‘commenting with baby on breast’ club 😉

GiddyUpGo123

“Adopting tactics of aggression and using cyber bullying is not the modus operandi of a well-intentioned education campaign that merely seeks to caution mothers.”

Hello, Pot? This is Kettle. You’re black!

Who?

Oh right. So calling out sefl-serving lies is aggression and cyber-bullying?

I have a nice bridge I’d like to sell you.

GiddyUpGo123

I’m not sure if my comment was misunderstood but I meant to say that when lactivists moan about “aggression” and “cyber bullying” coming from the other side, they’re being extremely hypocritical. No one bullies like a lactivist.

Who?

Sorry, my bad.

Empress of the Iguana People

Just because something is fairly “rare” doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t employ the ridiculously easy fix. Jeez, some people advocate car seats/booster seats for your tweens! It hurts no one to offer a bottle if a baby is still crying. Even a newborn can figure out how stop drinking. Landon’s story is so sad and i’m profoundly sorry for his parents’ being misled by people they trusted.

myrewyn

No kidding. I teach horseback riding lessons and my students who can gallop and jump their ponies in lessons get strapped into their boosters to be driven home. Seems a bottle for a newborn is at least as reasonable a precaution as that.

Cartman36

And just because it’s “rare” (I disagree that it is rare) doesn’t mean that mothers should be warned that the risk is there. That’s exactly what Fed is Best is doing. We would not accept a surgeon not warning us of all known risks of open heart surgery just because the risk is small so why in the hell would we accept that from lactation consultants.

Roadstergal

Risks are always about three things – the frequency, the consequences, and the tradeoff to avoid the risk. “Rare” is just the first part. The consequences are horrifying and the tradeoff to not have it happen is… having a top-off of formula. It’s therefore unacceptable, no matter how ‘rare’ it is, if it’s happening at all.

BTW, it’s a very developed-world comment, that starvation of a baby at the breast is ‘rare.’ Women without access to clean water would kill for the formula these institutions are demonizing.

Cartman36

I completely agree. I think we are so abundantly privileged in the US that we cant even fathom some of the struggles people face in other countries.

The Bofa on the Sofa

And we have very little perspective on what “high risk” and “low risk” mean. When MWs claim that childbirth is not risky, compared to anything else, it’s not even close. We’ve had this discussion, there are few events in life that people do that have even that 0.5/1000 risk of death (the risk of death in drunk driving is about 2/million on a per drive basis, for example).

Cartman36

Yes, I used to work in aviation and no one would fly with an airline that crashed once out of every 2000 flights but it’s totes cool if it’s the baby at risk during birth.

Blair

Explaining and practically understanding rare complications and mortality is challenging. If I have a healthy, non-asthmatic 8 year old in the office, the actual mortality of influenza which I am trying to prevent with the flu vaccine is -my best estimate- one in 500,000. My pitch:”if one in 500k commercial planes crashed, there would be 2 per month in the US. I’m pretty sure a lot of people wouldn’t fly if 2 commercial jets crashed per month”. The ACOG and AAP position on home birth makes me hypertensive. Something like: survival from planned home birth, low risk, pretty good=0.9985 vs hospitals=0.9995, or one in 1000 extra deaths. Holy crap, if you applied that to US birth cohort of 4,000,000/year, that would be 4,000 extra deaths or TWICE total US pediatric cancer deaths (all cancers age 0-18)

The Bofa on the Sofa

Yep

Eater of Worlds

Funny you mention this, because a study just came out that most children in the US who died of the flu are not vaccinated.

The point is, a large portion of those death would have been prevented with vaccination.
And when it’s YOUR child that dies a preventable death, knowing the risk was 1/800 000 isn’t going to help them in any way

FallsAngel

“Just 358” deaths in 5 seasons? (Yes, five, count ’em.) About 70/year. Do you know how the anti-vax crowd would screech if there were that many vaccine deaths? You do know how they screech over deaths that aren’t even due to vaccine, but follow vaccination in time.

Of course that is “ok”.
These infants died of the harmless, “natural” influenza virus, so that is “no big deal” as they say in antivax speak.
Yet one death from flu vaccine would be regarded as an unmitigated disaster in their eyes. Problem is, there hasn’t even been one death from flu vaccine.

shay simmons

Evidently. Dee is completely wrapped around the axle about an unknown number of vaccine-related deaths that he can’t even quantify but 358 deaths from a VPD are totes ok, I guess.

Young CC Prof

Of course, the probability that she will catch it and be miserably ill, or that someone in the family will suffer at least one complication, is really not that small at all. Flu vaccine prevents more than death, and the vaccine pays for itself in healthcare costs alone.

The Bofa on the Sofa

Jeez, look at the warnings for vaccines. You get things like “these things have been reported but occur too infrequently to know whether they are due to the vaccine.”

That’s rare. So rare, you don’t even know that it is a risk. But they reported anyway.

Daleth

Even a newborn can figure out how stop drinking.

I have a super-crunchy friend who argued with me about that even though I was telling her what MY OWN preemie twins had done. She insisted that bottle-feeding caused obesity, because with a bottle the baby can’t stop drinking until all the milk is gone, because gravity.

It was absurd how many times I had to repeat it, and how specific I had to be (“the bottles were 60ml and they would typically only drink about 17ml-23ml per feeding,” etc.), before she seemed to tentatively grasp that perhaps even my preemie twins were able to stop drinking at will and therefore PERHAPS her theory might be untrue.

myrewyn

Have none of these people ever fed a baby a bottle? Is it that rare now? I did a ton of babysitting when I was a young pre teen and teen and duh, of course a baby can spit out or push away a bottle when they are done. Every baby does it.

EmbraceYourInnerCrone

And if you persist and they are a full term newborn they will start thrashing, turning their head, flailing their arms and yelling. My daughter was really good at making Do NOT Want! clear if we didn’t get it right away. And for the first month or three she NEVER wanted more that 3 or so oz at a time.

KeeperOfTheBooks

Yep. For DS’s first week or so of life, he would want only 10 ml at first from a 60ml bottle. No one could persuade him to drink more–til 20 minutes later, when I guess he realized “oh, that was tasty, and I’m still hungry” and he’d eat another ounce or ounce and a half, and be done whether or not the bottle was.

Roadstergal

I mean, you turn a bottle upside down, and it doesn’t start dumping out. :p

Charybdis

What about the breastfeeders who have copious, firehose-like letdowns? Are they overfeeding their babies by expecting them to stay latched and gulp down the torrential flow?
I’ll bet they’ve never inverted a bottle to see that the milk doesn’t come flooding out of the nipple. It will slowly (depending on the flow rate of the nipple) form a drop and that will fall, because gravity. Babies are quite capable of refusing to drink more from a bottle when they are full/finished/sated, WTAF is wrong with people?

Empress of the Iguana People

My bf’d kid got to enjoy the torrential flow and he did tend to over eat, then spit up marvelously. My ff’d kid, not so much. And those newborn nipples ooze more than flow

BeatriceC

That firehose-like letdown is one of the reasons I nearly didn’t successfully breastfeed my oldest. He was already having trouble learning to latch onto a boob bigger than he was, then when he did get latched, it would nearly drown him. It took a while for things to even out a little bit.

Empress of the Iguana People

Sigh. I believe it.

StephanieA

Yeah, formula sure made my bony 3 year old obese! While my friend’s one year old weighs 30 lbs (mine weighed 21 lbs at a year for comparison). But it’s ok, that giant 1 year old is breastfed.

Azuran

It’s just stupid. I’m breastfeeding, and sometimes while the baby is feeding my breast just start shooting milk on their own. When she’s had enough, she just let go (and then usually receive a shot of milk in the face and everywhere on both our clothes) If she can figure out when she stops being hungry while my boobs are shooting free milk directly in her mouth, a bottle fed baby can too.

KeeperOfTheBooks

I had this argument with a LLL leader once, which ended with her saying, “I’m a LLL leader, so I know these things, and you are wrong.” Ooookaaaay…I guess I imagined DD and DS swatting away the bottle when they were done? (Or annoyed, or whatever.)

myrewyn

Blocking? Name calling? Indeed — watch the comment section for who is actually doing this.

Roadstergal

“a rare occurrence”

It was the defining occurrence of Landon’s too-short life.
Formula supplementation would have made his life far longer, and would have prevented the ‘rare’ occurrence of his death.

They can’t bring themselves to face this simple fact, and that will harm and kill more babies like him.

I was born in an era when breastfeeding was thought inferior. Yes, that pendulum was probably too far in the other direction in the ’70s – but how many babies sent home on formula starved to death? Did a _single one_?

Azuran

And yet, can you imagine their outrage if a woman died of a preventable complication of a c-section and the hospital said it’s a ‘rare occurrence’ and that they would do nothing to prevent such an incident from happening again.

Amazed

A British doctor said something like this about preventable baby deaths, that their mortality rate was per average for the NHS’s trusts. I said he was a moron (comment section as per yesterday). I am outraged with him and I am outraged with this moron as well. Sadly, I do agree they’ll be only outraged with the doctor.

myrewyn

Rare to die, maybe, but not so rare to suffer. And like you said, rare doesn’t matter when it’s your baby who has died.

Roadstergal

Especially when the tradeoff is – nothing. No tradeoff. Offer your baby a bottle after nursing. What’s the tradeoff of that that’s worth your baby’s health and life?

This only happens because institutions are telling women that formula is poison. It’s unconscionable.

Who?

This is the point, really. Giving a bottle is all upside, no downside.

Nothing to lose, and yet people just won’t do it.

AnnaPDE

Well yes, they’ve been conditioned to think that formula will wreck everything immediately. Unfortunately there isn’t enough moderating counter-opinion around currently. I’m so glad that FIB is changing that, and make sure to mention them (and how formula helped my BF) to all my pregnant friends.

Blair

I’ve been thinking about baby Landon. My initial impression to be honest was whether he might have had an inborn error of metabolism rather than died of dehydration. Then last week I had a 2 day old newborn who wasn’t breast feeding well, down 8%, who had a borderline/ low grade fever. His work up for infection was negative, but he had a sodium level that was very high, 154. IV fluid+formula solved the problem. Made me change my mind about Landon

EmbraceYourInnerCrone

I don’t understand. A person doesn’t get any food or water(or very very little) for several days they will be dehydrated. A person who only weighs a few pounds in the first place has very little reserves. As I understand it dehydration kills in days. It doesn’t seem like it would take long at all for a newborn’s electrolyte balance to get out of whack either… I don’t think dying of thirst is a very pleasant way to go either…

Blair

Inborn errors of metabolism encompass a wide variety of problems in the urea cycle, organic acid metabolism, or amino acid metabolism that can present the first week of life with poor feeds, lethargy , and cardiovascular collapse. Some of these disorders are tested in the newborn screen, sometimes referred to as the pku test, which is just one of the tested diaorders. This category of disease should absolutely considered in early deaths. I am all about fed is best–dehydration could accelerate the metabolic derangements that could occur with an inborn error

Eater of Worlds

You know, it would be very easy to rule out something like this vs dehydration at a very basic level. You’d struggle to take blood from a baby so dehydrated that it only pees brick dust, I would think. So give it a bottle while you’re rehydrating with an IV and see what happens.

Kind of like how they test for starvation in abused dogs and cats. Get the animal set up with basic needs, then feed it. If the animal gains weight, there ya go.

Of course you can’t just not check for things in a baby if you think something else is wrong, but the majority of newborns who are not gaining any weight and are dehydrated and entirely breastfed are going to be treated with a bottle of formula first, not a full metabolic workup.

fiftyfifty1

“You know, it would be very easy to rule out something like this vs dehydration at a very basic level. ”

I wish it were as easy as you assume it is.

“So give it a bottle while you’re rehydrating with an IV and see what happens.”

It’s not easy to give a lethargic baby a bottle. It’s impossible to give a collapsed baby one.

Young CC Prof

It’s not so easy to give one an IV, either. My son had lost 14% of his body weight and had a sodium of 159 when he was brought to NICU, and those nurses, who are really good with tiny veins, could not manage to start a line, because his veins were collapsed.

Watching them stick him over and over… Part of my soul will live in that moment forever. I have no idea how they actually started the line, by then someone ushered us out.

Empress of the Iguana People

god. watching the er nurses blow out my 20 month old’s was bad enough (They were trying to get him pain medicine before we were transferred to the er that handles peds) A newborn would be so much worse

fiftyfifty1

Yes, a colleague of mine was involved in a tragic case while still in residency. He was working an Urgent Care shift and a family walked in with an unresponsive infant who coded immediately upon entering the building and did not survive. It was severe dehydration from gastroenteritis. The baby had gone from seemingly OK to dead within a matter of hours. Although it wouldn’t have saved this baby, my colleague has forever after carried an IO device (bone line) to work and keeps an extra in his car glove compartment.

Blair

In India, 100,000 pediatric deaths a year due to rotavirus. They are working on a vaccine–ours is too expensive.

Eater of Worlds

Yeah, I’m not talking about babies that are that far gone. Just trying to say that jumping to treat metabolic disorders in a baby with those symptoms and breastfeeding seems like a case of zebras, and it makes no sense not to give a bottle before getting blood tests back.. And Blair is going off on catching these things before the baby is born which has nothing to do with babies dying from dehydration and trying to find out if Landon was tested for a metabolic disorder because his mother’s heart needs to be dragged through his death yet again.

Landon received a brain MRI in the hospital which confirmed brain injury consistent with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy or brain injury from oxygen deprivation due to low blood pressure from dehydration and cardiac arrest. He was diagnosed with diffuse seizure activity on EEG, the consequence of severe, wide-spread brain injury. Given his poor prognosis, he was taken off life support 15 days later. The autopsy report deemed the causes of death were hypernatremic dehydration followed by cardiac arrest causing hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (diffuse brain injury).

She doesn’t even have to claim their dogs are littermates to qualify as family to get the records from Seattle. She’s got the information at her fingertips, yet she wants to parade around saying this guy didn’t die of what he did. He was misdiagnosed and that’s why he died. Just pounding away at his parents’ broken heart. She apparently disbelieves the competency of the doctors in diagnosing their child. It just can’t possibly be due to breastfeeing is what Blair is saying. That’s truly despicable.

fiftyfifty1

” It just can’t possibly be due to breastfeeing is what Blair is saying.”

Quite the opposite. What she is saying is that when she first heard Landon’s case, she initially wondered if an inborn error of metabolism might not have been a contributing factor in his abnormal labs and collapse. But then she herself had a case soon after with a 2 day old who despite only “normal” weight loss was doing badly but fully corrected after rehydration with IV and PO fluids. Her point is that serious dehydration can happen sooner, and at less weight loss, than has been typically assumed.

Blair

Not sure why I am pooped on for this. As stated, I would have fed the baby. Inborn errors of metabolism–as stated encompass multiple different disorders –is indeed a zebra. In 20+ years as a pediatrician, I have seen a handfull. I have seen zero babies starved to death the first week of life. Neuroimaging can be helpful, depending on the specific disorder, but there is a lot of overlap in the appearance of the MRI in HIE, sepsis, or inborn error. My guess is that they probably did do an inborn error work up. I think you need to re-read my posts and then apologize

Roadstergal

This all seems like really, _really_ great reasons to offer a bottle after the breast for the first few weeks.

Blair

Actually it’s quite complicated. Certain abnormal metabolites are markers for certain disorders. The end pathway results in metabolic acidosis, so it can be difficult to determine etiology. Post mortem/autopsy should be done to try to figure it out–I worry about genetics and future children. I try to practice without letting medico-legal risk and fear of law suits dictate my practice, but there is a legal principle of being sued for “wrongful life” e.g. You missed trisomy 21/Down syndrome and they could have had an abortion. I wonder if Landon had an autopsy.

Charybdis

Serious question: why would you think he had an inborn error of metabolism? And even if he did, he was not getting anything from his mother’s breasts to metabolize. There was no supplementation, either by formula or donor milk from a milk bank, so there was nothing to metabolize there either.
Trying to shift blame from the EBF/BFHI brigade to the parents, especially the mother, and to Landon himself for not breastfeeding well and having the temerity to die instead of thrive like all breastfed babies *should* do, is myopic, cruel, tone-deaf and passive-aggressive. Why do lactivists insist that danger signs (brick dust in diapers, more than 7% weight loss, constantly nursing baby, jaundice, lower blood sugar levels, unsettled, screaming baby, etc) are ALL NORMAL?!!? Plus they are masters at deflecting mothers’ questions and concerns about their baby/babies feeding behavior. Why are they like this?

fiftyfifty1

“Serious question: why would you think he had an inborn error of metabolism? ”

Inborn errors of metabolism should absolutely be on the differential for babies who collapse unexpectedly in the first week. Medicine has characterized dozens of them and there are likely more as of yet undiscovered/uncharacterized. Each one alone is very rare, but there are enough of them that altogether they become common enough. A doctor who doesn’t know to put inborn errors of metabolism high on the list for consideration is a doctor who shouldn’t be working with neonates.

Amy Tuteur, MD

Dr. Amy Tuteur is an obstetrician gynecologist. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 1979 and her medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine in 1984. Dr. Tuteur is a former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. She left the practice of medicine to raise her four children. Her book, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting (HarperCollins) was published in 2016. She can be reached at DrAmy5 at aol dot com...
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